


Nochio

by gaypasta



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst and Tragedy, Canon Related, Halloween Challenge, Implied Psychic Abilities, M/M, Mystery, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Period Typical Bigotry, Period-Typical Antisemitism, Pinocchio AU, Slow Burn, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-01-15 17:37:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 53,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21257087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaypasta/pseuds/gaypasta
Summary: In the dark corners of the rotten house on Neibolt lies a puppet. Half-human. Half-dead. Floating. A bright boy, drawn by an inhumane force brings him home. When the puppet comes to life; Richie may be shrouded in more misery and dismay than Stan could've ever prepared for. Who exactly is he? Why has a part of this puppet wormed its way into Stan's heart?And how is he related to the disappearance of Georgie Denbrough?





	1. Chapter 0: The Disappearance of Georgie Denbrough

Police Department   
City of Derry   
  


**MISSING**

George Denbrough   
7 YEARS OLD

LAST SEEN OCTOBER 30 1988

DESCRIPTION: Date of Birth: September 18th, 1981. Male. 7 Yrs.  
Height: 49 Inches. Weight: 47 lbs. Blonde Hair, Brown Eyes. Wearing Yellow Raincoat, Distressed Blue Pants, Yellow Galoshes.

Persons Having Any Information    
Requested to Call   


800---131-0728 (207) 174-6913

  
  
  


**THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GEORGIE DENBROUGH **

**30TH OCTOBER 1988, DERRY, MAINE.**

It had been an uncharastically warm October in Maine in the year 1988. The riverbanks remained within their bays, seeming to be content to flush under the bridge and through the heart of Derry. No need to push itself over the embankments, or to spill onto the streets and flooding the weeds that cracked through parts of the pavement on Main Street. There had been a lack of torrential downpour, to the relief to the city workers and disdain of the countless children who donned their galoshes and stomped in muddy puddles until even their fat faces, pink with glee were painted with skids of mud.

It had to rain eventually, of course. And today - the day that Georgie Denbrough would go missing - the skies emptied. They emptied as if they were pre-emptively mourning the younger Denbrough boy. Children flooded into the streets as the river almost followed suit, laughing through splashes and mud-balls being thrown across the peaceful suburb, blissfully unaware of the tragedy which would drain the colour from their faces and force them into itchy black formal clothes not a few days later. The sky parted, rain pounding against the ground with enough force to trample the perfectly manicured daisies on the front lawn of the Denbrough household. 

Georgie, who had not long turned seven years old, sat on his older brother’s window sill, watching the droplets of water racing down the window. The far left droplet was a clear winner as far as Georgie was concerned. It was small, didn’t carry the same weight as the others, but it zipped past stagnant pellets with a purpose.It darted down, nearly - oh no, the - safe! A lone leaf, stuck with wind to the pane, couldn’t snag the droplet from its victory. The droplet carried on undeterred - it was  _ so close! _ Almost at the finish line! Just a hair away from winning the gold - hitting the lip of the bottom of the window and beating all the rest. Georgie had picked the right droplet to root for, he could feel it in his gut! His early victory was soon ripped from him when a droplet - big and fat and intimidatingly heavy had snuck up behind his tiny one, seeming to catch on the wind a little, before surging southward and swallowing Georgie’s droplet whole. Like it had never been there at all.

“Aw, man,” Georgie pouted, an unusual wave of grief washing over him - he had really wanted his droplet to win. 

“Are you gonna suh-suh-sit there in your underwear all duh-day? I’m almost done with your cuh-costume,” Bill said. 

Georgie, his toes barely being able to touch the ground, lowered himself down from the sill onto the wood of his brother’s bedroom floor. The floor was cold - his parents had forgotten to turn the heating on again. Georgie hardly felt the chill though, waiting patiently in Bill’s room with nothing but his briefs and a multi-coloured striped top. The top had been a hand-me-down from Bill, drowning his tiny frame and the sleeves were bunched up at the elbows to stop them from falling over his hands. 

Bill, however, felt the cold everywhere. Every intake of breath felt like he was inhaling shards of glass, settling in his lungs and causing him to devolve into another coughing fit - his poor dressing gown getting the brunt of it as Bill lifted the lapel to hack into it. The sudden sputtering made Georgie stall right as he was about to clamber up beside his brother on the twin bed, “You’re still sick?” Bill nodded weakly in response.

Georgie’s face dropped, Bill can’t still be sick - Bill had  _ pinky promised _ him that he would take him trick-or-treating tomorrow night. Georgie told him as much, getting onto the bed beside him with a look of disgust as Bill coughed milky-grey goop into a tissue just to scrunch it back up and put it in the pocket of his robe. 

“I puh-puh-promised, didn’t I? And -” 

“You never break a promise.” Georgie finished, Bill nodded in approval.

“Now how about you try on your cuh-cuh-costume? It’s guh-gotta look good if you wuh-wuh-want to get lots of cuh-candy,” Bill’s voice was sticky from phlegm and rasped from the constant coughing, yet it still held the same air of confidence it always had. Bill Denbrough, despite his stutter and even now, despite his chest infection, had an unquestionable strength to him, an unspoken type of leadership that he had been born with. Sure, at the tender age of thirteen he was a fairly timid boy, would not speak much out of turn, always said his pleases and his thank-you’s. Bill Denbrough had great manners, an untapped well of empathy and a righteous moral compass. Some would say he was born to be the ideal big brother to Georgie. Some would say he had no other choice than to look after Georgie better that he had been. No matter what different ways people painted his role - the world will soon come to a sorrowful agreement that Bill Denbrough is a shell of a child, splintered with grief over the disappearance of his baby brother.

But for now, Bill Denbrough was in his pyjamas listening to the rain battering their roof and his bedroom windows, painting over a pair of brand new overalls from JC Penney with deep red. Blood splattered up the hems of the legs with a huge splash of the stuff across the pocket of the chest. He had told Georgie to go into the garage to fetch sandpaper at one point so he could wear little distressed holes at the knee and the chest, breaking up the pristine even tone of the overalls. His own fingers were rubbed raw, the paint which had dotted his clothes and hands was hardly much difference in colour than his fingertips - but the soft  _ “oh, wow”  _ from Georgie had made the burning in his fingers worth it.

Georgie took the costume from Bill when he presented it, slipping on the overalls as carefully as he could -  _ “th-the paint is not fuh-fully dry yet” - _ he had to ask Bill to help him with the clasps on the shoulders, his hands too small to be able to move with enough dexterity to be able to clasp the fastener closed. The overalls were a little big on him - they hadn’t found any in Georgie’s size with the budget Bill had pulled from his piggy bank - Bill just said it added to the look they were going for, Georgie didn’t know what that meant but he trusted Bill’s judgement. With that, he ran over to the wall beside Bill’s bed, where Bill’s  _ CHILD’S PLAY _ poster was carefully taped to the wallpaper. 

“Do I look like him!?” 

Bill feigned a jump and a shout of fear, “Wow G-G-Georgie, you scared me! I th-th-thought Chucky came out of the puh-puh-poster, but you’re wuh-way scarier.”

Georgie puffed his chest at that.  _ Take that, Chucky, you stupid doll. _

Of course, Georgie wasn’t actually scary much at all. Even with his bloodied overalls, Georgie had an almost cherub-like appearance, with soft blonde hair, deep brown eyes and a pleasant smile. Georgie had the ability to light up a room just by walking into it, with a bright smile and his unbridled childhood innocence - Georgie was unspokenly, the favourite. Bill could never bring it within himself to resent him for it either, of course he was the favourite - he was Bill’s favourite too. 

Georgie paced in front of Bill’s mirror, pulling poses and gripping the handle of his imaginary knife - quick, clumsy stabs at his reflection. Bill laughed - which dissolved into another coughing fit - at him, “Guh-Georgie, you’re ki-kinda ruining the scare fuh-factor there.” 

Georgie ignored him and paddled back to his bed, hopping on and sitting beside Bill with his legs stretched straight out to prevent the paint smudging or staining Bill’s bed sheets. A fruitless endeavor of course, since the cotton was already speckled with red - not that Bill minded. 

Georgie let his head fall onto his brother’s shoulder - leaning against him. They sat like that more often than not, there was something comforting about resting up flush against his big brother - maybe it’s because Bill is grounding, comforting in a way like coming home after playing in the rain, to get changed into a pair of his favourite pyjamas. Maybe it’s because Bill is his best friend in the whole wide world - helping him with his schoolwork, showing him cool new comics, letting his little brother sit in with him when his friends are over, playing toy soldiers with him. Or maybe because Bill doesn’t push him away and tell him he’s too big to be cuddling up against him like his parents always said.

Georgie loved his brother - Billy was the best person in the entire world, as far as Georgie was concerned. Georgie fought for Bill’s approving nods and his hugs - especially the ones where Bill lifts him and spins him around. Bill was something else, something so unlike their parents, something so inviting and loving, something that Georgie could fall into safely, something that Georgie - even at just seven years old - could recognise as being the telltale traits of a wonderfully purely good person, even if he didn’t quite have the vocabulary to express it in such a way yet.

So he pulled the map of Derry’s residential streets that Bill had stolen out of their Dad’s office from the end of the bed and laid it along Bill’s lap, rearranging some of his paint brushes out of the way in the process. He sat up beside his brother and stared up at him expectantly. 

Bill huffed out a laugh, smoothing the map over his legs. He wiped snot from his nose with his tissue and stuffed it back into his pocket, “You want to guh-go over the route?” Georgie nodded, Bill didn’t see it but he felt the movement on his shoulder, “You know it’s nuh-nuh-not all that duh-different from last year.” Georgie just let out a grunt at this, wanting Bill to get on with it. “Hah, okay. So - we’ll go duh-down to the cuh-corner of Ashburn and Buh-Burnswick, we can hit a cuh-couple of guh-good houses down Buh-Burnswick Avenue, then we’ll guh-go down Park Way instead of Redburn - tuh-towards Stan’s house-”

“Is Stan coming?” Georgie’s face was fit with glee - Stan was really cool, Georgie had thought. Putting ‘Stan’ with ‘cool’ seemed almost like a joke - because Bill’s friend Stanley Uris was possibly the farthest thing from cool as a young boy could be. If Georgie had a more expanse vocabulary, he would say he was a little pragmatic. But Stan was good with Georgie - Stan taught Georgie how to add numbers  _ super _ fast - and even to do this really difficult thing called _ multiplication _ that Georgie doesn’t even need until he’s a big kid. Stan also taught him the rhyme about magpies when he and Bill were walking him home from school one warm Spring afternoon - 

_ One for sorrow _

_ Two for mirth, _

_ Three for a funeral _

_ Four for a birth. _

_ Five for Heaven, _

_ Six for Hell, _

_ Seven for the Devil, _

_ His own true self. _

  
  


It had scared him a little at first -  _ “So if I see seven magpies all at once the Devil’s gonna come get me?” _

_ “Ha - no, Georgie. It’s just a rhyme, like a song. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just fun to say it when you count them, isn’t it?”  _

_ “Yeah, I guess it is!”  _

Stan said it was just for fun, just a little song so of course, Georgie believed him. Stan would never lie to him, even if he thought it would be  _ really _ funny like that time when Bill told him that his birthday candles were special edible ones. They weren’t and they’d tasted horrible.

“I’d really like it if Stan came, Billy.” Georgie added, sinking into Bill a little more.

“Well, what if I duh-do you one buh-better?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“What if Eddie cuh-came too?” Georgie lifted his head off of Bill’s shoulder, opening his mouth to speak but Bill cut him off - speaking louder than Georgie, but with gentleness in his voice - even if his voice was raspy and sore, “And Ben! And Beverly!” 

Georgie let out a stream of excited noises, jumping up and down on the bed, quickly moving his energy into wrapping his brother in a tight hug, “Really? You swear?!” 

Bill let out a winded sort of sound when Georige all but barrelled into his incredibly sore chest, “Yeah, Stuh-Stan had actually suggested it, since it’s the luh-last time we’re guh-going to be able to guh-go trick or treating duh-dressed up buh-because we’re getting too old. We should all guh-go together and of cuh-course we need our scary Chucky doll.”

“You have to promise!”

Bill moved Georgie off of him to hold up his pinky, which Georgie immediately wrapped his own around, with all the gravity of a judge committing a man to death, “I puh-promise that on Halloween,I will take you trick-or-treating.” 

Bill, who if he were to have the gift of knowledge regarding the terrible events which would transpire with his brother, would not have made this broken promise. Instead, Bill would be sat, hardly even a day from now, stale tears flooding from his eyes, face red and blotchy, cursing at himself for breaking it. 

But for now, they bounced their fingers to seal the promise’s fate - notarizing it. Georgie relaxed himself back into the side of Bill and Bill continued, following the routes with his finger, “Ben only luh-lives in the street buh-beside Stan, and Beverly said she’ll muh-meet us there. So we’ll go from th-there duh-down the river into Main Street - puh-past the Aladdin, then we take the alley buh-beside the Butcher’s to buh-bring us to the end of Neibolt Street -”

“Do we  _ have  _ to go to Neibolt Street?” Georgie  _ hated _ that street ever since Eddie had shown up at their doorstep shaking about a weird homeless guy. Eddie said the strange man had offered him something, but Bill had covered his ears before he could hear anything else.

Bill looked over the map again for a moment, “Yeah. Look -” He pointed at a road behind Derry Library - “This is the only other ruh-road that leads to Eddie’s but the Buh-Bower’s gang hang out thu-there.” 

“Are they the guys that broke Eddie’s nose that time?” That time was two years prior, when Eddie and Bill had been playing in their fort in the patch of forest that breaks Derry from the Quarry. Henry Bowers had been looking for ‘some fat kid’ - which had turned out to be Ben - who had a big angry  _ H _ carved into the fat of his stomach when they had ran into him not fifteen minutes later. 

Bill nodded, “Yuh-yeah, they’re assholes.” 

“Bad word.”

“Sorry.” 

There was a moment of silence after that, as Georgie sucked on his tongue and weighed the ups-and-downs of his own comfort versus other’s - for a seven year old, it’s a pretty difficult decision. The concept of empathy and self-sacrifice more or less foreign to such a young boy. Bill was silent as he recounted the time Henry Bowers had held his head inside a water tank until his lungs were choked with water. He had been coughing up water for a week. He was thankful that Georgie had not been made aware of that experience - Georgie had seen enough of the bad people of the world when Bill had come home with his white shirt covered in the blood from Eddie’s nose and his fists shaking. 

“It’s okay,” Georgie decided, “We can go down Neibolt Street - I don’t want Eddie to get hurt again - but you have to give me all the fun-sized Snickers you get!” 

Bill hummed in thought for a moment, making long drawn out thinking noises, “I guh-guess that’s a fuh-fair deal.” He paused to shake Georgie’s hand - who was staring him down with a very serious face for a seven year old. It was funny and Bill had to bite back a smile, “Okay, so th-then once we guh-go through Neibolt street, we juh-just have to cross the bridge then we’re only two buh-blocks away from the rich fuh-folks.”

“Then we’ll get  _ loads _ of candy! Do you think we’ll get more than we did last year?”

“Duh-definately. With a costume as guh-good as that, they’ll buh-be throwing cuh-candy corn at you. You’re guh-gonna make us all luh-look bad with all the candy you’ll have in your buh-buh-buh-bucket.”

“Can we walk the route? I wanna count all the houses I’m gonna get candy from.” Georgie took Halloween  _ very  _ seriously. Every October 30th - Georgie would walk Bill down their route, tallying every house they planned to go to, writing the houses that had Halloween decorations, since they usually gave out better candy. It was a comical sight for the neighbours - the littlest Denbrough marching through Derry, notebook and pencil in hand, writing and scribbling onto the notebook looking not unlike a tiny Health Inspector, scribbling onto his clipboard. Bill was usually several paces behind, not seeming to be overly invested in the entire ritual - looking more like someone who had to take their energetic puppy for an evening walk to calm him down for bedtime. It was a ritual that Bill indulged, if not to simply have a reason to leave the house. The bag of candy split between the boys from  _ Malcolm’s Candy Emporium _ was also an essential part of the stakeout. Half bon-bons and half an assortment of fruity-flavoured jelly candy. Bill didn’t particularly care for either.

Sadly, the yearly routine would be disrupted, not by the horror hiding behind boarded up windows, not yet. No, the first disruption of little Georgie’s Halloween was as such, “Suh-sorry, Georgie. I’m ruh-really sick.”

Georgie lifted himself off of Bill to examine him, tiny judgemental eyes taking in all of his sickly brother’s poor complexion, “You’re being dramatic.”   
  
“Dramatic? Duh-didn’t you see th-the phleagm that I coughed up th-there? It wuh-was grey and ruh-really sticky and gross - I can show you if you wuh-want.”    
  
“You’re disgusting.” 

Bill’s short laugh barely had a chance to escape his mouth before it fell into another fit of coughing. He coughed into the lapel of his dressing gown, feeling sticky bits of phlegm start to land on his tongue. The coughing made his shoulders shake and seemed to form deep inside his core, shaking him forward with every wet-sounding cough. It was enough to make Georgie pull a face and hop off of the bed. 

As soon as Bill was able to somewhat contain the fit, he reached for his glass of water - long lukewarm and already half-drank by now - and took small sips, trying to soothe his freshly-ripped throat. The water seemed to somewhat smooth over the sandpaper, however it did little to help the sticky, gross stuff that was spluttered up from his chest to his mouth. Bill took out his tissue and spat the phlegm into it.

Georgie looked at Bill with a mix of disgust and pity, “Y’know, I can go and count the houses on my own.” 

Bill shook his head, eyes screwed shut as he coughed heavily into the tissue.

“I can Billy! I’ve walked through all the roads at least a million times, I won’t get lost.” 

Bill raised his eyebrow at him, stuffing the tissue back into his pocket, despite the fact there was a fresh box of Kleenex on his bedside table, “A muh-million, huh?”

“Uh-huh! At  _ least!” _

Bill shook his head, face apologetic. “Sorry Georgie, you can’t guh-go puh-puh-puh-past the end of our street on your own, it’s too duh-dangerous -”

“Dangerous? What’s dangerous, Bill?” Georgie crossed his arms, he wasn’t a baby anymore, he could walk around town on his own - he walks the whole way home from school on his own! 

“Cuh-cars, you could suh-slip and fall, buh-bad people, wuh-werewolves -”

“I won’t walk on the road, I’ll wear my  _ good _ galoshes and I’ll stay where people can see me and not talk to strangers - and werewolves aren’t real, Billy! I told you that!”

“Guh-Georgie, I don’t think you sh-should-”

“Mom will let me - I can just go and ask her.” 

He’s got Bill there. As perfect as the Denbrough family is, in theory, with a lovely little house in the middle of a street lined with perfectly identical lovely little houses, with a manicured garden and two young, well-mannered handsome boys - it’s little more than that. Their parents are good people, they take their kids on fishing trips and vacations and attend all the school meetings and of course, it goes without saying that they keep their boys fed and watered. The brunt of the issue was that the lovely little house in the middle of Colby Avenue with two well-mannered sons was that the two well-mannered sons seemed to be the  _ only _ residents of this lovely little house at times. 

Bill let out a defeated sigh, a sigh of all types of defeat, bested by not only his brother, but fate too, “You won’t guh-get lost?”   
  
“Nuh-uh!”   
  
“You won’t tuh-talk to strangers?”   
  
“Nope.”   
  
“And you’ll be careful?”    
  
Georgie nodded his head, bouncing up and down on his heels, excited to be able to prove to Bill that he could do it by himself. He could walk around Derry on his own, he wasn’t a little kid anymore. 

Bill didn’t look fully convinced, but he nodded Georgie away, “Wuh-well, I’m nuh-not exactly fit to physically hold you buh-back, just come home when th-th streetlights cuh-come on.” and like that - Georgie was away with a shout down the hall - “ _ Thanks, Billy!”  _ \- barely remembering to close Bill’s bedroom door behind him. But he did, and a couple figurines on Bill’s dresser rattled with the slam. 

This left Bill to clear his bed. He coughed into the sleeve of his dressing gown weakly as he gathered up his paintbrushes. Not caring much about the flecks of red that were staining his sheets, he could worry about them when he was feeling a little better. 

Bill felt his body groan in protest as he lifted himself off of his bed, as if he was a senior citizen struggling with arthritis. He was feeling better than he had been, the drugs clearly working wonders beneath his skin but Bill was still sick - it was as evident as the dark circles under his eyes. His body shook with violent coughing fits, his vocal cords were ripped from them too. His skin was a milky-grey sort of colour, constantly prickled with dampness. Even his thoughts were slow and sluggish, finding himself take an extra couple moments to read the analog alarm clock perched on his bedside table, his eyes struggling to make sense of the words in his comic books. 

Yet, the thought of waking around Derry tomorrow evening with his little brother excitedly pulling one of Bill’s friends in his tow only made him bubble with excitement. The only way that Bill would miss out Halloween is if he were to drop dead.

\--

When little Georgie waved goodbye to his brother from atop the trampled bed of daisies on their front lawn - neither of them could have known it would be for the last time. Georgie - whose cheeks were pink with excitement - waved so hard that the movements of his hand moved into a fleshy type of blur to Bill. Bill, who always rested himself against the window sill whenever Georgie would leave to go play with his friends until he could no longer see the energetic fit of yellow could hardly have known that he wouldn’t have to sit there again. In the months following he did so anyway, of course. Bill would sit, his desk chair pulled out and propped awkwardly in front of the window, hours watching the miserable streets - hoping to see a bright yellow coat scampering home, as if he had just lost track of time for several months.   
  
Of course, he did see the return of the yellow raincoat. It had been presented to him by the cop at his front door like a former pet turned roadkill, with a face of half-guilt and half-’I’d rather be anywhere else but here’. _We found it floating out by the sewer pipe, down the East side of the Barrens _is what they said. _His name is stitched on the label, if you want to look -_ but Billy didn’t need to look. He had known well enough. He had zipped the raincoat up enough times to know. He had picked it up off the floor when Georgie left his outerwear in a whirlwind of energy. He had washed the dried mud off it in a basin of warm water on the kitchen sink. He had seen that raincoat march off of their front lawn enough times to know.

The back of that damned raincoat running off of their lawn and down to the end of the row of houses, out of the safety of Bill’s eyesight over Colby Avenue would haunt many of Bill’s nightmares for the foreseeable future - until he drinks energy drink after energy drink to pull his eyelids open enough to stop the dirty, wet raincoat bleeding behind his eyes, and when that doesn’t work he sneaks into his Mother’s room and takes her sleeping pills, allowing himself one every other night to knock him into a sleep too deep for dreams.

But for now, blissfully unaware that Georgie running out the door with his raincoat on and galoshes to power him through with Neibolt Street as one of his destinations, having twisted Bill’s arm enough to do so on his own - had effectively hammered the last of the nails into the tiny coffin of George Elmer Denbrough. Bill Denbrough went back to his bed.

Outside of the perfect little house where Bill was settling back into bed, Georgie followed the routes with no issue, stopping at particularly big puddles to jump in them, not minding that his new galoshes were getting caked with mud - Bill would help him clean them when he got home. The rain was making little plasticy pelting noises as it battered his raincoat. He managed to keep a tally of all the houses they would knock on without the paper getting too wet. It was hard, and he had to twist his torso over the notepad, but it was doable. It went on like any other year, Georgie walking down streets that he knew like the back of his hand. The only difference was that Billy was wrapped up at home, in the safety of his blanket. 

Absolutely nothing was amiss.

Georgie took the turn onto Main Street. 

Main Street, as its given name, was the most centrepoint of Derry. Stores lined either side of the long stretch of road, all sorts of ones. Pretty much anything you could need was situated somewhere on Main Street. Wide sidewalks with benches and lamposts and little decorative flower pots. Perfectly manicured trees that served nothing if not to break up the concrete. Halloween themed banners and flags and posters strung up on every surface - black and orange and purple and green - Georgie didn’t really like any of those colours, his favourite was yellow. There wasn’t a single lick of litter on all of Main Street - there never was. In fact, Main Street was a perfect presentation of a plucky, community-led town; tidy, colourful, filled with shoppers and dogwalkers and children running through the rain being chased by frantic mothers.

Georgie felt himself come to a halt outside the storefront of  _ Johnson’s Toy Palace - _ a small enough store with an olive green door and a deep rich red sign with its name in pretty gold-speckled cursive. Normally, the display window would present toy trucks, or massive stuffed animals that were nearly the height of Georgie himself, usually a multi-coloured collaboration from multiple types of toys and games that never failed to attract the eyes of Derry’s younger populace. But today, surrounded by bright artificial plastic toys and games, sat a doll. An expensive looking one, too - with smooth, porcelain skin and features so clearly hand-painted with care. It was a boy, his hair slicked back and professional, wearing a pair of formal shorts and a little white shirt and a red bow tie. Georgie couldn’t help but stare at it for a bit, feeling unnerved by the incredibly life-like glass eyes that were staring back at him. They were dark, a cold type of brown - not like chocolate, or like any warm earthy shades, and definitely not sparkling with life and curiosity like Georgie’s - but cold like dried mud caked to the side of a truck that hasn’t left the driveway in months, cold like the rings left on white china from half-drank coffee. 

** _Blink._ **

Georgie startled back, the noises and life of the Derry Streets suddenly flushing back into his ears - as if the world had been desaturated as he met eyes with the doll. He grappled for the weight of his notebook in his pocket, feeling a little grounded at the shape of Bill’s notebook weighing against his thigh. He quickly turned and walked away, feeling a little green and wishing that Billy was with him. 

_ No! _ \- He was brave enough to do this himself! It was just a trick of his eyes, surely. There was no way that a doll can just blink on its own - was there? 

Georgie took a glance backwards at the store, too far along the street now to be able to see the doll through the window. His eyes were drawn to it, like a rat drawn to rotting food - unable to take his eyes off of the mostly unassuming storefront. He didn’t pause his pace, in fact, he increased the speed in which he moved away from the store the longer he looked at it. 

Right until he barrelled into something. Georgie bounced back with a small  _ oof -  _ and met eyes with the person he had just walked into. It was a man - it would have been rude to describe him as underwhelmingly bland to look at - but it would be true. There was little other descriptions about the man Georgie could have gave - starkengly average, with nothing about his face or body that would make him identifiable in a crowd of white middle-aged men. In fact, all adults looked much like that, Georgie had thought. Bland, fake and perfectly manicured. The man didn’t appear upset, in fact, he apologised and gave Georgie a stiff smile and went on his way, not really seeming to register Georgie’s wary face. 

_ “Duh-don’t talk to st-strangers, Georgie.”  _

So Georgie didn’t - not ever. And especially not to any adults he meets - they all have this vacant look in their eyes - as if there is a film between their brain and their eyes, watching everything that happens before they even get a chance to. That is what it is to be an adult in Derry after all. Slightly-off, weird, creepy - Georgie thought all of those things. Georgie wonders with a slight quiver to his lip of when he and Bill will start to watch the sun rise and fall and rise and fall again into the horizons with blank stares and a stiffness in their face. Will they be old-old? With wrinkles and liver spots and greying hair? Or will they still be young? With meat still on their bones and freckles still speckling their cheeks. Georgie wonders when him and his brother will lose the ability to have fun and laugh and play, what’s the exact time and date of their souls snagging on their childhood as they age and it falls past them, if you please? 

  
  


Georgie, who despite his good grades and diligence, had an awful habit of getting lost in his thoughts. This is only proven when not minutes after colliding with the man whose face Georgie hadn’t even been able to remember in the first place, Georgie had walked half way down the alleyway between the Butcher Shop and the Print Store, staring straight ahead with his eyes open, but still not registering the parked up bicycle until he had caught the handlebars on his ribs. He yelped in surprise and overbalanced too hard, not far from falling flat on his butt when a pair of hands steadied him.

Georgie was pulled out of his thoughts sharply, as if the boy in front of him had yanked them out of his ears. The boy, who Georgie will come to recall as  _ Mike Hanlon _ \- was by all means a stranger - but Georgie didn’t feel any instinctive danger when Mike patted his shoulders and fixed his hood, which had fell down the back of his head in the jostling. “Are you alright? That looked painful.” His voice was low and gentle, like they were speaking in a quiet room rather than outdoors off the Main Street with rain thundering down. It was so soft that it should have been muffled - but it wasn’t - Georgie heard every word as clear as a bell. It was low, and it was quiet, but it seemingly sought out Georgie’s ears - like he spoke exclusively to be heard by him. Maybe he did, maybe the universe had made it so.

Georgie nodded, already trying to move under Mike’s gentle hold - Mike let him, but faulted him with his words, “Woah-woah-woah, where are you going? Aren’t you with your parents or someone?” 

Georgie felt his wariness faze out of him with the genuine concern that washed over him. He felt safe with Mike, Bill’s words fading from his head. He felt safe, despite being told to feel otherwise by his friends at school - ‘ _ My Mom says those blacks that own the farm up on Bluehill are the ones that kidnapped Ed Corcoran.’  _ Georgie had told Bill what his friends had said about the black family up on Bluehill and Bill had been really mad. Especially when Georgie had asked him what the names they called the family meant.  _ That’s a ruh-ruh-really bad word. Muh-maybe one of the worst wuh-words ever. Don’t eh-ever say it - _ and he didn’t. 

“I’m going onto Neibolt Street. I’m counting all the houses I’m gonna trick-or-treat at tomorrow.” Georgie said, knowing he shouldn’t tell a stranger where he was going. But he felt safe, as safe as he felt when Eddie and Stan walk him home from school when Bill’s at his speech therapy in Bangor, or when Bill takes him out of the house when his parents start to talk loudly from the bedroom and they go to the playground and Beverly pushes him on the swingset.

Mike makes a pleasant noise in his throat, “Sounds fun, are you going trick-or-treating with your friends?”

Georgie recalls the things his friends had said about the boy in front of him, suddenly filled with disgust at them, “Uh-huh! I’m going with my big brother. He’s my bestest friend, and his friends are my friends, too!” Geogie says, before a thought shoots into his head that makes him grin, “Hey! Maybe you know them, they’re in High School, Bill is my brother and his best friends are Eddie, Stanley, Ben and Beverly. Beverly is  _ really _ pretty, I think everyone knows her - she’s got red hair and sometimes she wears it in pigtails and it looks really nice, like a cowgirl!” 

Mike hummed in thought, “Well your brother and his friends sound like really great people, but I don’t go to Derry High School - so I’ll have to take your word on it.” Georgie nods, agreeing. His brother and his friends  _ are _ great people - this Mike Hanlon guy really sure does know what he’s talking about. “And your brother - he knows you’re out here on your own?”   
  
“Yep! He says I’m really grown up that I can go by myself.” He didn’t say that, but he felt the need, as most children naturally do, to impress the older kids.

“Well, alright - I’m sure he’s told you to be back home before it gets dark, huh?”    
  
“Yep! When it starts to get dark and the streetlights come on I have to run home!” 

“He sure knows his stuff, huh?”   
  
Georgie nodded and the conversation came to a natural and comfortable close, a strange feeling of familiarity bubbling between the two boys. Georgie felt as though he had met Mike before, the way he spoke and the calming and grounding personality he seems to naturally exude had been so achingly familiar that Geogie could have  _ sworn  _ it - only Georgie would certainly remember meeting on of the only black people in Derry - it was a detail that he couldn’t bring himself to assume he would forget or disregard. 

He gave a pleasant _ ‘goodbye, mister’ _ and a wave and left the alleyway, finding himself not too far from Neibolt Street with the overwhelming feeling in him that Mike was somehow incredibly important.   
  
The walk to Neibolt was as uneventful as Georgie had hoped. He walked through the empty streets, tallying in his little notebook. The clouds seemed darker on this part of Derry, twisting into dark, heavy clouds the further he walked. The rain continued to pelt the ground - an entire season’s worth of rain seemingly being emptied onto Georgie’s yellow hood. It didn’t faze him in the slightest as his face was twisted in concentration, little tongue peeking out as he continued to tally the houses on Southern Neibolt. 

Then, on a little patch of green between number nineteen and number twenty-one, a flutter of movement caught Georgie’s eyes, taking him by surprise at the sudden burst of movement against the otherwise stagnant street. 

“Oh, wow,” Georgie said, marvelled at the flock of birds that had soared down from the sky, and settled on the ground as a group - like a type of avian choreography, pecking at the ground in unison. Georgie had never seen such an act of uniformity in a group of birds before - he wishes Stan was here to see it - he would have his socks knocked right off! Georgie pocketed his notebook slowly, careful not to move suddenly as not to scare them off. 

Georgie raised his hand, pointing at each bird while he counted.    
  
“One...two... three...four…” Four for… a birth, if he was right. But there’s more than four, so he kept counting, “Five, six...seven,” Seven for…  _ oh gosh. _

Georgie huffed and walked past them, none of them seeming to even recognise that they were in the presence of someone. He walked down past number twenty-three, then twenty-five, then - a strange shifting noise sounded out through the heavy streets. Georgie spun around, scared. The birds had all flew off silently, it seems, aside from that, nothing seemed noticeably different. His raincoat seems a little pale, sickly in colour, though. The dark, swirling stormclounds seemed to swallow Georgie to The House as he marched forward. His stomach twisting and his eyes glued to the ground. 

_ Not afraid. Not afraid. Not afraid. _

The thoughts burned like acid in his brain, lining his gut heavy with a strange feeling, the feeling - which Georgie is too young to have a proper word to associate it with - is guilt. Guilt from a lie. Georgie had told many lies today, it seems. Not only to Bill, but to himself. The biggest one, of course, was that he would come home when the streetlights came on. Because the streetlights came on and off and on and off and on and off again many times. Not once did Georgie come home.

** _POP_ **

Georgie starts and spins towards the noise. The sound rang out so loudly and suddenly that it felt like his head was snapped into looking at the target of the noise. And there it was. 

29 Neibolt Street.    
  


A home - no… never a home - a building, one that seems to ooze darkness. The House itself, dark and grey from battered paint and rotted wood and an almost unearthly type of desaturation. In fact, the grass from the sidewalk seemed to grow from green to yellow to grey in proximity to the building, like simply being near it is enough to rot the life out of nature and if the abundance of dying plants and long-dead bushes which resembled tumbleweed weren’t enough. Georgie doesn’t want to think of what other types of rot reside in the building. 

The rot which sunk its teeth into the window panes of the exterior and moulded away at the panelling was enough to make Georgie’s stomach churn. There was something evil there, evil enough to make his breakfast curdle and his legs shake, evil enough to root him to where he was stood as the monster of a house seemed to stretch and grow into the ink-black storm clouds, ready to chew Georgie up and spit him out like a lump of chewing tobacco. 

**_POP!_** on his left.

**_POP!_** on his right.

Two echoing loud pops burst one by one in either of Georgie’s ear. He turns his head instinctively towards each one. By the time he turns his head to the direction it was originally facing his feet were no longer planted on the cement of the road. Rather, bright galoshes on rotting wood.

He was on the front porch of The House, only inches away from the front door. A little figurine of yellow, trembling like a leaf at the mouth of the beast. There was little to be done at this point. Now, with Georgie’s little yellow galoshes planted firmly on the front porch of Twenty-Nine Neibolt Street, he has no chance. Nobody dared go near the home, the sudden atmosphere of dread slicking out of the boarded up windows of the house like ooze, slinking across the dying grass and staining the streets with the pre-emptive morbidity of the fear-stricken child currently standing - and without his knowledge of it, on his deathbed.

_ “Hi-ya, Georgie.”  _

Georgie spun around, a squeal dying on his lips as though it was vacuumed out of him when he saw that he was not alone. A man. A man was standing on the final step of the porchway, effectively trapping Georgie on the porch. 

Georgie knew straight away that he should get as far away from this man as he could, a physical and tangible feeling of dread leaving him stone cold even his frantic shaking. This man, tall and winding, like a caricature of a person drawn by someone who has never seen one before, had a face unlike any one Georgie had ever seen. Unlike anyone that  _ anyone _ had ever seen. Long, and gaunt and grey enough to be that of a corpse. His pupils were quivering in his eyes, bouncing back and forth off the iris’ like a heavy vibration. Thrumming with …. Something. Shaking with containing something so unearthly  _ horrific _ that Georgie’s cheeks ran wet with fear.

“ _ You’re early for Halloween,”  _ The man’s voice was stilted and uneven in tone, as if it was purposely manicured to leave the recipient of his words on edge, “ _ Your costume is dripping.” _

Georgie looked down at his pants, and sure enough, the red splatters of paint that Bill had so painstakingly painted had started to run, the sharp and defined splatters of the stuff appearing blurry, even behind Georgie’s own blurry tears.  _ “Say, let’s go inside - I’ll fix you right up,”  _ The man moved forward, arms reaching out towards Georgie like two big scorpion claws, ready to close down on his arms. 

Georgie saw an opening, and he took it. He propelled his little body forward as fast as he could, swerving around the man with as much stability as his shaking figure could muster. 

The man didn’t even follow Georgie with his terrible eyes. Georgie sped past him, jumped down the steps and had been so close - only a hair away from being free, from sprinting through all the puddles of Derry, past the Butcher’s and the Print Store and past the Uris’ and onto Colby Avenue. Sprinting past all the vacant and uncaring adults staring through the sobbing child, sprinting past the happy, fat-faced children, and up the stairs and into his big brother’s arms to sob and cry and heave his near-death experience into his chest.

That’s what he thinks, at least. In reality, this man - this horror - had never let Georgie escape. Georgie’s fate was etched into the walls of Neibolt, unquestioned and unavoidable. A simple fact of the Universe. The sun rises in the East, the tides move in and out of the sand, the moon waxes and wanes and crescents, and Georgie Denbrough’s fate is sealed at The House on Neibolt Street.

Long, sickly grey fingers twist into the hood of Georgie’s raincoat. 

Georgie cries out and grapples at the fasteners, all but ripping the coat off of him, twisting and turning his arms so quickly it tugs painfully at his shoulders. He stumbles as he slips out of it and half runs-half crawls towards the street for several paces, the dead grass, despite the rain, crunching like bones under his feet. 

He didn’t get far before he stills. 

He stills mid-run, just on the edge of the lawn and the street. 

A stinging, high-pitched sound clamps his muscles and twists his guts. A sound, which by description, seems like nothing much. Like the high pitched squeal of a cheap dog whistle, just barely audible to the point where your ears strain and get flush with effort to hear it, sending thumps of pain into the side of your head like a storm of an oncoming migraine. In reality, to little Georgie Denbrough, it was a siren’s song. An audible Black Spot, the sound more filled with death and decay and all things that could possibly be more atrocious and ungodly than that. 

And it would be the last thing that would grace Georgie Denbrough’s ears on this thunderous and fateful day. 

The last sound gracing the seven-year-old’s ears being something that even he, somewhere deep,  _ deep  _ in his core - recognised as the true sound of evil. The sound that could bring the entire planet to a standstill if it so wished.

It was only seconds later, as a flit of yellow blurred past his vision and into the streets, did the final sight young Georgie would see fill his view. The man, his mouth so beyond human, so twisted and insidious, opening wide.    
  
Wider.

Wider.

_ Wider.  _

It split into his cheeks and his flesh cratered open, the muscles tearing apart like slicing a knife through soft butter. His skin bled with sick, grey-ish blood and it ran down into his mouth and drooled from it like it would from a starving dog. 

Georgie let out a weak yell, not a cry for help. Georgie knew there was no helping him now, he knew that well enough. A cry of sorrow, a broken apology so soft and wet-sounding that it was drowned out both by the thundering pelts of the rain and the siren, which only got louder with the gaping mouth expanding further into the cheeks of the man, whose face was split open like a venus fly trap, gaping maw drooling onto Georgie’s brand new galoshes. A faint, acidic glow began to split its way through the maw, Georgie helpless but to stare into it. A glow which was less welcoming than a hole in the head. A glow which encompasses every single act of Hell in its wake. 

“Billy…” And with that cry on his mouth, Georgie came face to face with the last sight of this terrible, terrible day burned into his retinas.

  
Georgie Denbrough’s final glimpse of this world, was - is - ironically, the most nefarious part of it.    
  
The Deadlights.


	2. Chapter 1: The Discovery In Neibolt

**THE DISCOVERY IN NEIBOLT  
Mid-February, Derry, Maine, 1989.**

The turn of the year came and went, like the repetitious cycle of a washing machine filled with bath towels, heavy with soapy water - turning and twisting over themselves, slapping heavily to the bottom of the drum and back around, a never-ending cycle up around and around and around. 

Georgie Denbrough, of course - was never found. Not without trying, though. There had been search parties at first, bands of concerned parents stalking the streets on the Eve of Halloween. Nightly the party grew smaller, until by day seven, it was just Bill and his parents, walking down through Derry with flashlights and hoarse voices. Until it was just Bill, dragging his feet down the same handful of streets every night. Stanley had once seen him walking past his house some time near midnight when he was fetching a glass of water, Bill’s flashlight like a cane that he was using to perch up his heavy feet. Stanley had ran out the front door in his bare feet after him, asking him what the hell he was doing out on his own at this time of night - on a  _ school night _ nonetheless -  _ ‘Luh-looking for Juh-Juh-Juh-Juh-Juh-’ _

Since that night in late November, Bill’s friends had joined in on the search for Georgie. It was never stated - they would never dare utter the words out loud, even to themselves - that it was a fruitless search. Georgie, along with all the other kids who have gone missing over the past year in Derry Town, would never be seen again. His missing posters would soon be layered over with another kid, another kid who’ll be eventually forgotten except for mutterings between clouded adults -  _ “That Denbrough boy is waiting outside the Elementary gates again, who’s he waiting on? I think he has a brother or something…”  _

This unspoken loyalty to their friend, this unspoken agreement between the four - between Eddie Kaspbrak, Ben Hanscom, Beverly Marsh and Stan Uris, that their friend, that Big Bill - was struggling, that none of them know enough of grief and loss to do anything but follow him down the inky streets of Derry, flashlights splitting open the streets as they look around at the same roads they had looked around for months already. 

Stan hadn’t had it in his heart to object, to tell Bill that this wasn’t healthy, that he needs to accept that his brother is gone. But who was Stan Uris to squash the last remaining ounce of hope of Bill’s - the tiny ounce of hope that pulls him out of bed and into his sneakers and through the rise and fall of the short glimpse of the sun. Stan hadn’t lost anyone before, not like Bill has - so he would hardly know the first thing about dealing with it. Bill’s just trying his best, and Stan alongside - all their friends - will support him through that. He was sure they would do the same for him. 

He would follow Bill to the ends of the Earth, he thinks. He would follow any of his friends to the ends of the Earth. They’re bonded something special - or so Ben had said. Beverly reckons that they’re so close because running through the halls trying to avoid the Bowers gang will bond people like that. Stan thinks it’s somewhat true - considering how quickly they were to welcome Ben into their group after that day in the Quarry. Bill, Eddie and Stan had known each other from Kindergarten - Stan being ostracized for crying when his coloured pencils were organised in the wrong order in his pencil case. Eddie throwing tantrums and growing green at the sticky, booger-ridden hands of his peers. And Bill - whose stutter at the time was so prevalent that a single sentence took minutes to punch out from his mouth. They had bonded at the little picnic table on the playground - all of them a little red-faced and teary-eyed - they had been drawn towards each other like magnets - not really being sure why or how they knew, but they  _ knew _ . Beverly came next, in middle school, when the girls in her year would throw names at her feet that they were too young to know, when the boys would come asking her if the rumours were true (they weren’t). Then, last but not least - well, not truly last, either, as they will come to discover - Ben, when he stumbled into Eddie and Bill with the Bowers Gang hot on his tail. A group of losers - pushed together by exclusion.

It was a little easier dealing with the bullies when he had friends like them, but Stan - despite being the same age as everyone else - had been held back a year due to a sudden and rather violent burst of illness sometime in mid-Elementary school. So he doesn’t have Bill and Eddie to walk with him down the halls, or Beverly to wait outside his class to walk to gym together, or Ben to sit with during lunch period underneath the great big willow tree. He was vulnerable and an easy target. 

But all of that seemed irrelevant now, as he cycles down Derry Main Street, all his friends cycling beside him. A row of five.

_ Not for long. _

The thought punctured confidently through his own - so foreign and so  _ weighted. _ It wasn’t his own - it was someone else’s - even if it doesn’t make any sense. There was no room for arguing with himself, it was so decisive and so final that Stan - a reasonably sensible and firm voice of reason most of the time - accepted the pious reverence with no qualms. He didn’t think about it again - not for a while, not yet, anyway. There will be a time when he does, when the  _ five _ of them falls from his mouth like an incomplete sentence - but that’s then. This is now.

What’s happening now, is Bill gliding smoothly off of the street and onto the sidewalk, dismounting with the type of strong gracefulness that only Bill could pull off. Stan and everyone else followed suit, stilling their bikes but not dismounting them. Bill was addressing them, “I wuh-wuh-want to fuh-follow Juh-Juh-Juh-Juh-,” the words turn over in his throat like a car engine, he sucks his lip into his mouth, a nervous habit he had picked up over the years, and continues, “the ruh-route that he tuh-took when he wuh-went muh-missing.” 

Under the cold evening winter haze, everyone exchanged glances between each other, bursting with conversation that they all understood so easily between each other,  _ “We’ve done this so many times…”  _ Eddie’s eyes said to Ben’s,  _ “Yeah, we have - is he losing it?” _ Beverly’s twist of her eyebrows said,  _ “Guys… we gotta say something, this is getting out of hand - how long are we going to let this go on for?”  _ Ben’s eyes said, almost ashamed,  _ “Well I’m not saying anything,”  _ Stan started, with everyone else exchanging glances with each other with the same thought smattered on their faces. The entire interaction lasted maybe a moment - two at a stretch. None of them found it strange that they could hold conversations with their eyes - Bill, Eddie and Stan had been doing it since barely a month after meeting, and Beverly and Ben had quickly fell into it, too - but it was strange, even just a little. 

“Bu-but …. we haven’t buh-buh-been down Nuh-Neibolt street yuh-yet-” A pointed, unaccusing glance at Eddie.

“No -,” Eddie interrupted, face taut with nerves, “We’re not going there, Bill. I told you. I’m not going back on that fucking street after what… after what happened.” Bill’s face fell a little, and he seemed to shrink a little into himself at Eddie’s statement but he continued anyways, hands flexing on the handlebars of his bike - Silver.

“Buh-but he could buh-be there, he cuh-could have guh-gotten lost, he nuh-nuh-nuh-never went down that street before… that-that guh-guy could have kuh-kidnapped him - the guh-guy that offered you-”

“I know what he fucking offered me, Bill!” Eddie cut him off again, which was unlike him - usually Eddie never butted heads with Bill, compliant in doing whatever Bill would drag him off to do, but not this time. Not Neibolt. “I want to find Georgie, Bill - I do. Just as much as any of us do - and I’ll do  _ whatever _ it takes to help you look for him. I sneak out behind Mom’s back, I cycle until I get cramps in my legs, I ride out past midnight in the dead of winter and risk getting influenza and being brought to the ER again -” Bill looked a little sheepish at that, since Eddie, had in fact, spent days laid up in hospital after one of their searches, “But I will  _ not _ go down Neibolt, not again. I’m sorry, Bill.” 

Bill spared glances at the rest of them, locking eyes with Stan - who felt a strange sort of magnetic feeling in his gut,  _ “You’ll still come, right?” - “Of course, Big Bill, how could I not?”  _ \- the silent exchange seemed to build Bill up a little, affirming his place in the world for a little bit.

“Eddie could keep watch? Stand at the corner of Neibolt and Berkston and shout for us if anyone’s coming?” Beverly said.

“No.” Stan glanced around to see who had said it - only to be met with a crowd of eyes staring back at him, the words hadn’t made movement past his lips - he hadn’t spoken them, he doesn’t think. Only he did, he had said it with a powerful force swelling it out of his lungs that oozed from his head like molten gelatine. The following sentence had barely had a moment to register in his brain before it was being pushed past his lips without hesitation, without any real understanding of the weight behind it, “It has to be all of us. All seven of us.” 

“Stan… there’s only five of us?” Beverly said, her voice laced with concern. Stan had a strange look on his face, like he was staring off into something no one else could see.

“Not for long,” Stan said, the same strange feeling flushing through him, not necessarily comforting but truthful all the same. His face darkened somewhat, like a shadow was passing over it.

“Are you alright?" Beverly said.

“Yes…" He turned the words over in his head, "We have to go in, not just for Bill."

Everyone exchanged glances for a moment, Stan, for once, being on the outside of the conversation… unable to decipher exactly what Eddie's shifty eye movements and Bill nibbling at his lip meant in the grand scheme of the context of which they lie in.

"We're sixteen now, right? How long are we gonna be scared of going down Neibolt street? Sure, number twenty-nine is creepy; it's rotting and it looks like it's straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock film. And sure, some creepy homeless guy tried to proposition Eddie, but how is that any scarier than what we see every single day? Is a creepy house any scarier than Henry Bowers carving his name into Ben's stomach?" He gestured at each of his friends as he continued, "Or all the shit they say to you, Bev? Or… God… how could it possibly be worse than Henry holding Bill's head underwater until he's near waterlogged blue?"

All of them struggled to meet his eyes, choosing to pick at their nails or in Eddie's case, fiddle with thought at the zip of his fanny pack, making sure it - along with his pills and his aspirator - is firm by his hip. 

Stan didn't waver, "It's just an empty, run-down house. That's all it is." Of course, it wasn't simply an empty run-down house. It wasn't empty at all, not really. They brushed the bad, looming feeling of dread that washed over them when they walked past it as nothing more than the overactive imagination of their slowly waning childhood, they had no reason to believe that that particular feeling of dread was the evil of IT - the evil that had webbed its way through the cosmos and through the stars long before the creation of man.

"But what if …" Eddie took a riddled gasp through his aspirator, "what if the homeless guy is there again?"

"Then we luh-luh-leave. We try again. We come buh-back tomorrow." Just like that, Bill's word was law. 

Bill mounted Silver like a general leading his troops to battle and rode off, legs pumping with ease, the breeze seemingly parted for him, which it probably did, they’d all reckon. If anyone could push the wind to move and part for him like Moses at the Red Sea, it was Bill. Stan followed him, naturally falling behind him in formation without noticing, an unspoken but seemingly important arrangement of themselves. Bill was at the front, leading them on with an outburst of  _ 'Hi-yo, Silver away!' _ \- which he never seemed to stutter on. Stan was behind him to his left, with Eddie on Bill's right. There was an empty space between him and Eddie, as well as between Beverly and Ben, who were cycling about five feet behind Stan and Eddie. The space, which until this moment, had never really felt like a space at all… but something had changed. Stan felt it. Something had shifted and the space between him and Eddie seemed like a glaring span of emptiness, like a piece of a puzzle yet to be filled. Stan couldn't help but glance at the space… feeling a strange type of sadness for it, a type of mourning for someone he had not yet had the pleasure of meeting.

They rode down Main Street, pedaling in unison, their formation tight. No one ever slowed or sped past another - as if a grid held them in place. Bill, whose legs pushed down on the pedal with a type of ease that can only bloom with the power of practiced muscles, with heavy calves and taught legs - Bill could cycle near as easy as walking. Stan, however, could not. He wavered and wobbled a little on his bike whenever the wind cut through him at certain angles. He was not as well versed in cycling as Bill - Bill’s bike was less of a means of transport and more of an extension of himself… Stan not so much. It didn’t come naturally to him like it did Eddie, who despite being cautious, managed to be the most proficient - even more so than Bill. In fact, it was barely a week ago when Stan’s front wheel had twisted over an awkwardly placed rock, sending him flying over the handlebars like a gag from a Chaplin movie. Eddie had spent twenty-five minutes disinfecting the cuts and scrapes on his hands and knees. Stan still had the medical-grade band-aid on his knee. Those things stuck like they were welded on.

Stan wobbled a little on a gust of wind that seemingly split through them as they turned onto Neibolt. Stan had felt it. The creeping feeling of something wrong… something morbid. He looked at the others, at their expressions. They all had felt it, consciously or not. Their confident strides of the wheels of their bikes slowed into trepidation. Even Stan - who had been so sure of himself that there was nothing to be afraid of. He was swallowing his words now. 

They could only see the very tip-top of the arching roof from the end of the street, being blocked by its neighbouring houses. It was enough, it seems. Enough for doubt to seep into their guts. Eddie - whose face resembled a recently bleached sheet - took a heavy gasp of his aspirator, the gasping noise echoing in Stan’s head. Had he been wrong? This place gave him all types of creeps, he couldn’t see more than its hat and yet he was swallowing his tongue. There was still a strange … magnetism about the house. Like when you see a cloud of smoke from a fire and want to find the source, eagerly pedaling towards it to watch the elements turn a building to cinders. As is the human nature of morbid curiosity. 

Their slow cycling came to a standstill, sitting on their seats - rather uncomfortably, Stan might add. Each of them just waiting for someone else to speak up, a voice of encouragement or - if they could be so lucky - a suggestion to turn around, go to the candy store instead, and go home. 

They weren’t that lucky because not a moment after Stan had begun thinking of what candy he could buy with the change rattling in his coat pocket, Beverly started talking, “Don’t tell me you’re all chickening out?”

Silence.

Beverly let out a huff of frustration, “Bill - even you?” Bill looked a little wide-eyed at being caught out, “And Stan - what about your big speech about facing our fears? You were right… we’re too old to be scared of a stupid ol’ house. Once we go in we’ll be laughing at ourselves for being baby enough to be scared at all,” Her gaze caught Stan’s, eyes as wide as his own, but sure. Braver, “You can’t be bailing out now, Stan. Not after that speech… are you a man or are you a mouse _ ?” _

Stan twisted the rubber of his handlebars, “I think I might be a mouse.” Despite what he said, he kicked up a pedal and slowly edged forward, which encouraged Bill to push forward too. 

“Aw fuck… I guess I’m a mouse too,” Eddie said. He soon matched Stan’s pace, “we’re all fuckin’ mice.”

“Speak for yourself,” Beverly said, ushering Ben to follow them, not that she needed to - he was ready to follow Beverly at the drop of a hat - before it hit the ground, even.

“What are you then, Beverly, a muh-muh-man?” Bill said.

Beverly let out a laugh, “Definitely not. I’m a woman… that means I’m a lot braver and a lot smarter.” 

“My dad says that women are more sensitive… that they are the fairer sex,” Stan said, not believing a word his father had said - not after meeting Beverly, anyway. 

“I think your dad’s full of shit, Stanley,” Beverly said, with playfulness in her voice.

Stan agreed with a  _ ‘yeah, probably’ _ and the group broke out into a chorus of giggles. Bill laughed softly, a gentle almost feminine type of giggling that even Eddie - who hated the word - had described as  _ cute _ on more than one occasion _ . _ Beverly’s laugh was quiet, usually she tried to swallow it in her throat, so used to keeping herself as small and as quiet as possible that even something as natural as laughing was a spectacle, but once you got Beverly going, she didn’t stop until she was red-faced with wet running down her cheeks. The first and last time that had happened was after Bill had walked face-first into a lampost. Both Beverly and Stan seemed to find the smash of blood painted over the ‘ _ Missing Cat - Answers to Angel’  _ deliriously funny. Ben, much like Bill, had a soft sort of chuckle, usually only lasting a couple of bursts of breaths. Eddie, however - his laughter could be heard from the other side of a room, loud, brash, and almost manic-like cackling of a witch on opium. Stan, who rarely found much funny, had an odd enough sense of humour, so when he laughed, he was usually laughing alone - a clear laugh like that of fresh-cut silver would ring out amongst confused stares.

As nice as it would be to read of this disjointed, yet somehow almost harmonious chorus of laughter for just a little longer, it didn’t last. Even with the slow crawl of their bicycles, it felt like mere moments until the laughter was being drained from their lungs. There it was. Twenty-nine Neibolt Street. In all its greying and rotting glory. 

The house seemed to warp the air around it, sucking all the goodness and health out of the sky and leaving it with a twisted mockery of a halo that circled it - a halo of dark and stormy clouds that Stan could swear had never shifted… but he can’t be sure. He always forgot just how ghastly and unsettling the house truly was until he had the displeasure of visiting it again. They all forget. Every time they think of Neibolt, they remember that it’s unsettling. They remember that it causes unpleasant feelings to ripple through them, but the feeling is all they truly recall. 

The five of them were paused on their bikes, balanced with one leg on the concrete and the other at the pedal, ready to push off and fly away at a moments notice. They looked like ants to the house. Little insects leading themselves into a flytrap - and all too aware of it. The house seemed to bow and break into looming over them, swallowing the sun and sending dark, hefty shadows down over them. Stan could hear… wood snapping. He could hear the sound of creaking, like the sound of an old house settling but much louder. More deliberate. He swears he can hear something else, too…

Crying? A quiet, echoing chorus of cries and sobs. The sound of helplessness. The sound of damnation. The sound of the human spirit rotting from the inside out. The sound of-

Eddie’s aspirator jumped Stan out of his trance … or whatever that was. Stan wondered how Eddie hadn’t punched all the gas out of it yet, and he asked as much. 

_ “ _ I have a spare in my fanny pack.” Of course he did. 

Bill let Silver fall to the ground, her bell making a soft  _ ding _ as it hit the sickly coloured grass, “Yuh-yellow slicker, yellow galoshes and duh-denim overalls,” And that was as much of a pep talk that Bill seemed willing to give, striding up to the house. Stan felt air whoosh out of his lungs when Bill planted his feet on the first step of the porch and turned around to face them, his eyes flicking over them with a very uncharacteristic type of wariness. 

“Bill… you don’t think he’s really in there… do you?” Eddie had began to say, but thankfully Ben sent a soft kick to the back of his calf before he was able to let the rest of the sentence fall haphazardly from his mouth. The look on Bill’s face and the way he bit his lip told Stan that he’d pieced the sentence together anyway. 

“We’ll look, Bill. We’ll all look,” Ben said, “Isn’t that right, Eddie?” He gave Eddie a nudge with his shoulder, sending Eddie’s heads into a dance of nods and  _ ‘uh-huh’ _ s. 

Bill accepted that, and turned to the house. Standing so willingly, so tall and so bravely where only months before his younger brother had been quivering. Shaking and scared. Instead of a Denbrough being crowded onto the godforsaken porch by a genuine reckoning of horror - Bill was bracketed by his friends. A safety net, to catch him and support him and help him bounce back if he were to fall. They all shadowed him as he moved closer to the door, inching along with him. Stan briefly glanced at his friends and wondered if they even realised they were moving - all staring at Bill with looks of steeled determination and unwavering support. If they were underlined with fear and dusted with pity then Stanley chose to ignore it.

A pregnant pause. 

Bill raised his hand. Slowly, achingly slow. Stan’s hands embered into clenched fists. The air stilled when Bill’s hand made uneasy contact with the doorknob. A heavy, round looking thing, the brass cloudy and mottled with age - it seemed too decorative, too lucrative to be garnishing the splintering molded wood of the door. The air stilled. Noticeably and suddenly. Like the wind that had been gently rustling the trees had been switched off at the socket by a cosmic force. The air was deathly still.

And then Bill twisted the doorknob and opened the door. 

The breeze came back suddenly and much colder than before. It  _ whooshed _ out of the house like a starved dog, trapped with its deceased owner, door creaked open by cops with flashlights after the next-door neighbours complained of a foul smell. Foul smell indeed, Stan thought. With the breeze, came a wretched stench. 

_ Rotting vegetables, _ Bill thought.   
_ Busted sewer pipe,  _ Eddie thought, with an audible gag.   
_ Something decomposing, _ Beverly thought.   
_ Rotted wood, filled with maggots, _ Ben thought.   
_ IT,  _ the turtle knew.

The brush of cold air seemed cold to everyone except Stan. To Stan, it was something else. Something a lot … more than wind. Something had been released… something that only the seven of them could truly comprehend. In due course. 

_ Seven. Why seven? _

Stan stopped thinking about it. He knew the answer would reveal itself when it was ready. So for now, he followed closely behind Bill as he edged into the doorway. 

Cobwebs hung heavy from the ceiling and across the walls. Bill broke them apart with his hand as he led the group into the house. None of them spoke, in a collective type of fear. Their gut instincts had told them this place was bad - haunted, even. And yet, they had battled against those instincts and allowed themselves to step fully into the house- 

The door slammed shut behind them.

They all swivelled to it, taking heaving breaths of fear. Beverly - who had been last through the door had been the first to break the silence, “I didn’t do that. I left it open.”

Stan gave Eddie’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze through his hyperventilating. On closer inspection, it was less hyperventilating than it was Eddie shooting rapid fires of _ ‘fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck’. _ Stan lowered his hand then. 

“It’s juh-juh-just the wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-” Bill wet his lips and tried again, “the wuh-wind.” 

None of them really believed Bill and if Bill’s gnawing of his lip was anything to go by, he didn’t quite believe himself, either. It steeled them nonetheless and none of them jumped whenever someone stood on a thunderous floorboard. They marched on, with Bill leading them with eyes darting around for the chance of a sliver of yellow, with Eddie’s aspirator making a rattling sound in his trembling hands, with Beverly and Ben barely an inch away from grappling onto each other and finally with Stan, who was in between Bill and Eddie, with his little pocket-sized bird book in his back pocket. Somehow this little thing gave him worlds of comfort. 

Once they made it through the entranceway, they had enough room to stand in a circle, with Bill stepping forward, not necessarily enough to be in the center but enough for everyone to fall to attention. Stan’s back was pressed up against the banister of the stairs. Somehow he couldn’t quite shake that thought from his head.

“We should sp-puh-puh-lit up,” Bill took in their worried faces, “juh-juh-just into two groups, we’ll nuh-not be alone.”

“I’m with Bill,” Eddie said, stepping a little closer to the boy in question. If you were safe with anyone, it would be with Bill, nothing could hurt him. When you were with Bill you were untouchable - or so Eddie thought anyway. 

“Okay. Muh-me, Eddie, and Stanley will check this duh-duh-duh-door,” Bill pointed to a door to his back, to the left of the staircase, “and Beverly and Ben cuh-cuh-can luh-look in there,” He pointed to the door opposite the other, Beverly and Ben took a wayward glance at it.

“That works for me,” Beverly said.

“Is it a good idea for us to split up like that?” Eddie asked, nervously looking back and forth between Beverly and Ben and the door behind them. He wasn’t nervous for himself or Stan; they were with Bill. Stan wished he held Eddie’s blind faith.

“It’s only across the hall, what’s the wuh-wuh-wuh-worst that can happen?” Bill said, moving back into line with Eddie - who had edged so close to Bill that he had accidentally shouldered him as he stepped back. Stan didn’t want to think about the worst that could happen - he didn’t have the  _ creativity _ to imagine what bad things could happen behind the doors of this house. 

Stan took in the peeling wallpaper, spotting black and growing little spores in the corners of the hallway. They’re inside _ Neibolt. _ The thought rushed through Stan. He could hardly believe it. He’s here - in his winter coat and his white runners - both of which are already caked in dust and whatever else is floating through the thick, dirty air. Stan made sure to breathe through his nose from then on. 

“Okay, let’s go. Lead the way, Bill,” Eddie said, holding his hand out to Stan. Stan wasn’t sure why, but he took it. Eddie’s hand was smaller than Stan’s. Smaller than Bev’s, probably. His grip made up for it though, Stan was sure that if something were to try and drag him out by the hood of his coat that Eddie’s hand would hold him firmly in place. Stan tried not to think about it much. Eddie’s other hand reached behind Bill and shook slightly as it made hold on one of the excess straps of Bill’s backpack, from where Bill had adjusted it to fight tight against his back so it wouldn’t bounce and knock his balance when he was riding Silver.

With Ben and Beverly mirroring their actions behind them, both groups splintered and made way into their rooms. 

The kitchenette was nothing short of disgusting to Stan. With warped floorboards and dark, grimey stains on the counters, strange scatterings of goo on the ground and shriveled up old leaves from the fall. And the dust. Can’t forget the dust. 

Eddie took a shot of his aspirator and dropped his hand out of Stan’s. It took him a little longer to drop his hand from Bill’s backpack, and he only did so as Bill hiked over the remnants of a broken chair. Stan stared after Bill as he looked around the room, seemingly not at all discontented by the brown muck that made a gross squishing noise as he stepped through it. 

Eddie, with his aspirator between his teeth and his face heavy with determination, clambered (with a lot less grace) over the chair and followed Bill, stepping over the brown goo, but batting down cobwebs and opening the grimey cupboard doors all the same.

Stan looked with them for a bit, actively avoiding touching anything if he could help it. Eddie and Bill may have been all too eager to get their hands dirty but Stan was not. He kicked around the debris that was scattered along the floor - probably remnants of furniture with his boots, scanning for any wash of yellow. His search was interrupted by a heavy  _ thunk _ from over his head, dust falling from the ceiling from the weight of it. He looked up and spluttered as the dust inhaled into his lungs. 

“You alright over there?” Eddie asked.

“You nuh-nuh-need a new luh-lung? Pretty sure Eddie has spuh-spare in his fanny pack,” Bill said, earning himself a swift Chuck to his shin.

Stan blinked the dust from his eyes and stared in disbelief at the ceiling, then back to Bill and Eddie who had already gotten back to what they were sifting through, “Didn’t you guys hear that?”

“Huh-hear what?” Bill asked, suddenly giving Stan his full attention.

Something twisted uncomfortably in his stomach at that, he could see the brightness in Bill’s eyes and the hope that was swimming in them. He didn’t miss Eddie’s pointed stare,  _ ‘don’t get his hopes up.’ _

“Nothing,” Stan said, glancing back up to the ceiling, then back to Bill, who had deflated a little, “I think it was just Beverly and Ben in the other room. It spooked me, is all.” 

Bill gave a little “Ah, alright,” And went back to pulling open cupboards, his attention pulled away from Stan and back between looking through the dirty shelves. Eddie was chatting to him about something or other that Stan couldn’t quite make out. Stan could, however, make out the voice that rattled through his head.

_ Over here, Stanley.  _

The voice had come both from within him, and from somewhere else. A strange pulling sensation gripped him and he knew that he had no other real option but to listen to it, he knew that himself from somewhere deep inside himself.

Stan’s body turned to follow the voice, he had to - of course. There was no force strong enough in the universe to pull Stan away from following it. As the universe instructed, he followed it, turning his back on Bill and Eddie - who hadn’t noticed Stan leaving them to continue exploring the ruins of the kitchenette as a duo. Stan followed it out into the hallway, framed with ratty cobwebs and bits of what Stanley  _ hoped _ was glass crunching under his runners. He didn’t like the thoughts of what else it could be that he was walking over. He could hear Beverly talking from the room on the opposite doorway that Stan, Eddie and Bill had been in… but she was muffled. 

Not in the normal ‘muffled through drywall’ type of way - more similar to Stan like being underwater. He can hear her. He can hear the slapping sound of water splashing. He can feel the water in his hair. It always pulled his curls straight and made his hair look much longer than what it was. The water is a little cold, it brackets his lungs when he first jumps in.

He is in the quarry. 

Neibolt Street? What was that? Stan could barely remember… an old church? A store, perhaps. The memory just far enough out of reach for him to give up. Why should he worry about some random building when he is having so much fun. The sun was kissing his skin, tanning his shoulders through the thick droplets of quarry water that dripped steadily from his hair.

Summer days were meant for this, Stan thought.  _ Good God, I could float here forever… the warm sun, the warmer water. Hell - if I could drop out of Middle School and spend the rest of my life here, I would. Maybe we could find a clearing to play ball? Or maybe Eddie and I will come down in the early morning and sit on the grass watching the sunrise through the trees... maybe we’ll see a violet-green swallow… or maybe even a tree swallow! Eddie will like their pretty blue backs, I bet. _

Stanley’s daydreams were interrupted by a watery, feminine shout. It was only watery because Stan’s ears were half-in half-out of the water, but it caught him in a moment of shock all the same, “My key… I can't find my key!” Followed by the noise of splashing, as if Beverly Marsh were patting down the surface of the water like she would her jeans, “The clasp must have unlatched… I need the key, I’ll be in deep shit if we don’t find it.” 

Stanley righted himself and tread the water. Beverly’s face was brimming with fear. Not quite a child who was frightened of the big, bad monster hiding under the bed when the lights go out. Not quite an adult who was frightened of much less imaginative things. But  _ real.  _ Beverly’s face was stuck in a trench between the two, both childlike and young, cheeks still round with puppy fat, face smattered with freckles and free of blemishes… but shadowed with a very adult, very  _ real  _ fear. Stan wasn’t quite sure what any of it meant. He gazed at the treeline as Ben began to swim towards her, sentences of what he would say to this  _ beautiful _ girl already tunneling through his thoughts.

It’s so warm today. Had it been this warm all day? Stan can’t recall.

“Maybe it got caught on your blouse when you were taking it off?” Ben’s voice equally sweet as it was sickeningly so when he spoke to Beverly.

“Maybe…” 

“You and Ben sh-sh-sh-should check the cliff, in cuh-case Ben’s right - then it should be up with your clothes, ruh-right? Eddie can check the sh-shallow wuh-water, me and Stan can luh-look in the deep wuh-water,” Bill said.

“Shouldn’t Eddie be the one to dive into the deep water?” Stan said, “He can suck on his aspirator like those tanks the deep-sea divers use… he could search the whole Quarry with that thing between his lips,” and if they weren’t so preoccupied with finding Beverly’s necklace then they might’ve had a good round of chucks at Stan’s joke. He got a short chorus of laughter anyway, and a splash from Eddie, which was for effect more than anything else, since Stan was too far from them to even be  _ close _ to within splashing range.

Had he always been that far away? 

Suddenly, they were looking and Bill was about thirty strokes from where he had been previously, and even farther from Eddie now. The sun moved behind the clouds and Stan could have sworn that the water had been a little warmer. Probably just his imagination, his father always said he had an overactive one… always brimming with stories and silly tales of ghosts and nightmares.

He didn’t think any more about it and easily transitioned from treading water to breaststroke. He was a good swimmer, better than Bill, even. Stan was fairly decent at athletics, he didn’t particularly enjoy the types that made him sweat - like Eddie and his running. Eddie sprinted like nothing Stan had ever seen. A little Tasmanian devil, Beverly would call him. Eddie never particularly minded being sticky and red-faced for a while afterwards. He never seemed to need his aspirator afterwards. No… Stan wasn’t fond of all that. He liked swimming, sure - but he loved baseball - and he was good at it, too. 

But, they’re not playing baseball… they’re swimming. Stan thought he should ask the group if they should head to the Derry Leisure Center and rent out a court. It only cost a dollar for an hour - he was sure that they could scrape that amount of change together. Stan didn’t think about it for long, a glint catching his eye from beneath the water.

Stan stopped and stared at the space for a while - but the water was pretty murky at the bottom… a dull brownish-colour from sand and God knows what else…  _ shit _ , Ben reckoned. Stan knew it wasn’t true, but the fact that Ben had said it had always popped into his mind whenever he watched the murky water consume his feet. And it’s about to consume his hand, too - since he couldn’t get a clear enough view of what had glinted, he was going to have to palm uselessly at the rocky bottom.

So he did, with a great big breath and with the grace that only Stanley Uris could manage; he dove down into the water. Beverly could swim underwater with her eyes open, Bill could too, for a bit… but Stan could not. The water felt heavy on his eyes and they always burned afterwards. It only occurred to Stan as he was halfway between the surface and the rocky bottom, that he could have easily shouted for Bill to look underwater for a bit… but this was mid-dive… mid-propellation. So he continued, arms stretched out, fingers pointed out to await the first touch of stone.

He made contact. Slimy contact. The rocks thick with algae and all sorts of bottomfeeders. Stan didn’t like it one bit, but soldiered on, only barely letting his fingers grace over the rocks. His hands searched and searched and searched. He kept having to kick his legs to keep himself sunk, the air in his lungs trying to lurch him to the surface. 

Would he even feel the key if he were to ghost over it? Water has a way of numbing everything else… wrapping around you and nullifying all your senses… like some type of alien pod from one of Bill’s Science Fiction movies. Stan couldn’t really expand on the comparison past that, since he didn’t really care for those movies. It  _ did _ feel somewhat alien… the slimy-fuzzy rocks. 

Stan’s fear of his senses being too dampened by the water to feel much was soon proven to be null when his fingers made contact with something.  _ What was that? It wasn't a rock - that’s for sure. Not slimy either, though… it doesn’t feel much like a key. Oh, God… I hope it isn’t like something from one of Bill’s horror movies… dismembered bodies and zombies and all sorts _ … _ nothing short of ghastly. _

Stan, who knew in his head that it didn’t feel much like a key at all, made a split-second decision to wrap his hand tight around the object before he was forced to surface. He had decided that the chance of this strange, foreign object being Beverly’s key - no matter how low - was bigger than the chance of him ever finding out if he were to leave it lying amongst the scuttlebugs and sandy water of the Quarry bed. 

He broke water quickly, taking urgent breaths of air. He had been down longer than he thought, it seems. His chest blew in and out of itself as it tried to desperately take in air. The sheer power of it had alerted Bill, who was dipping in and out of the water’s surface with a lot less gravitas than Stan. 

Bill’s genuine concerns washed over Stan’s ears as he barely managed to right himself. But he did, and he wiped the water from his eyes with the heel of his left hand.

“Duh-did you find it?” 

Stan blinked and grimaced in discomfort. He always managed to get water in his eyes. The world slowly bubbled into view, and Stan watched as Bill doggy-paddled over to him. The object lay heavy in his hand. A part of him felt he shouldn’t look. He shouldn’t see whatever this is. He should just let go and let it sink to the bottom again… to be tucked into a bed of algae and consumed with it. 

He didn’t, of course. He didn’t drop it back down after almost heaving up a lung to find it. He moved his left hand into the water to work to keep him afloat and he looked…

A pair of glasses. A pair of thick, barely rounded-off square glasses with lenses so thick it made the guppies in the water through it look like cod. Stan couldn’t help but feel discontented. Not because it should have been a key… in fact, looking for Beverly’s key had left his mind entirely and if you were to ask him about it he would stare back dumbly in response. No… he was missing something. There was something he was forgetting. That’s the trouble with forgetting things… you always remember you forgot  _ something…  _ but you’re never quite able to remember what that  _ something _ was. Like not remembering a person’s face, but being able to pick their shadow out of a crowd. It was teasing. It was nothing short of mental torture. Stan stared at the pair of glasses.  _ I’m close… I’m so close…  _

_ You are close Stanley. Do not let yourself forget.  _

_ Keep going. _

Stan fell through the water. The glasses flushed out of his hands. Everything flew out from between his fingers. The air… the water… the algae-covered rocks… the murky sandy water… the tiles. Tiles? Roof tiles. Beams. Wooden beams. Sickly and green and splintered. Dust. So much dust. It covered the air and dulled the light and refracted off itself like waves colliding on the beachfront. Stairs. Down each single one. BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG. Like a sack of potatoes. Rotten, rooting, foul-smelling potatoes. 

Pristine white runners.

Pristine white runners.

They belonged to Stan. He kept them meticulously clean - he was a meticulous boy. They bleached the light around them, cutting through the decay of even the air itself inside Twenty-Nine Neibolt Street.

He had been here all along. He had never left at all. It was the dead of winter, hardly even the memory of summer in his head. The Quarry water hadn’t pulled his curls to his neck in months - and he  _ definitely _ did not find a pair of glasses there.

The Stairs. 

Stanley had to go up the stairs. He somehow knew this. They creaked and groaned with every step, no matter how light and tentative he took them. The handrail had coated his hand in aged cobwebs like cotton candy nightmares. He flailed his wrist to try and free the silk threads from his hand, sticky webs clinging to his skin, layering and entrapping him. He continued onwards nonetheless, not deterred by it. 

The upstairs landing seemed to creep up on him and he felt a breath of shock leave his mouth when he stepped up on to it. The upstairs was a lot darker… both in relation to light and in relation to…. something else. He struggled to breathe properly, like his lungs were filling up empty. He tried looking back down the stairs, but it was painted with inky blackness. He couldn’t see past the fifth step or so at all, like it was a black hole beyond that point. He could no longer hear Beverly’s muffled talking or Eddie’s occasional puff on his aspirator. In fact, he couldn’t hear anything. The silence was deafening. No noise from the breeze of the wind knocking against loose boards on the windows… none of the gentle rumblings of cars driving past… no little whistling noises from the draft… nothing. Stan could hear his blood pumping in his ears and every time he shifted his weight it felt disruptive. It felt wrong.    
  
He was intruding on something. The creaking of the floorboards under his cautious steps was furious. Stan felt like he was breaking bottles in a graveyard. He was disrupting something... _ someone.  _ This knowledge was undisputed. A gnawing feeling of truth surrounded the notion. It wasn’t a feeling… not so much an inkling either - it was a simple fact, undisputed and so glaringly obvious that it was hardly worth mentioning at all. The sky is blue. Fire is hot. Flowers bloom in Springtime. Stanley Uris is stepping into something  _ much, much _ bigger than him... something equally wanderlusting as haunting. 

A slapping noise that Stan could have picked out from a mile away splintered through the stale air. It shattered something. A tangible feeling of… something good. Hope? Peace? A type of salubrious homecoming that Stan couldn’t describe. It shattered it. The distinct sound of birds wings slapping as they flapper to the ground. A sound only Stan Uris could identify so on-point first try. 

The magpies were pecking at the ground of the hallway to Stan’s right. He hadn’t moved from the landing from where he ascended, two directions split his advancement. The left or the right. The magpies were on his right. There were no open windows. 

_ One for sorrow… _

_ Two for mirth… _

_ Three for a funeral… _

_ Four for a birth. _

Stan’s belly ached with dread.  _ Birth is good, it’s good - it’s a good premonition, one of luck and one of health… _

_ Why does it feel so laced with deception… it feels like a prank. These birds…such strong feelings of enmity are billowing through my britches and yet… I have to follow them. Surely not… surely I don’t.  _

_ Your instincts are not a decorative aspect of your Biology - follow them and trust them. _

So he did. The birds were gone all of a sudden. Stan didn’t hear them go and they left no indication they had been there at all. No feathers… no shit… nothing. Stan went to the door. Not  _ a  _ door….  _ the  _ door. This was significant somehow. This door, which Stanley - even in the pits of his stomach, where his gut had been pulling him towards this particular door - had no idea of its  _ true _ importance. This door… with its fractured wood and paint long bled into the air… this door would change his life. This door would open little Stan Uris to an entirely new type of living. No longer would his biggest fear be something as childish as the zombies from Bill’s horror movies… no longer would his dreams and ambitions be the childish nature of  _ ‘a Doctor… or maybe a Lawyer’ _ \- more akin to  _ ‘dear God, just please let me see the sunrise tomorrow’. _ A world equally as brimming with love, adoration, new types of wonder and the smallest things showering him in bewilderment as it is shadowed by hurt, pain and a type of fear that no group of people have ever been subjected to before. A type of fear that exists in the thrums of the universe… within the webbings of the cosmos and bleeds through rivers and seas and burns light through the sky. So primal and so out of touch to the tiny human brain that there are no words … no arrangement of stupid, shitty human words in any language… Greek...Latin...even the grunting of the cavemen….no disjointed slapstick of words could ever even begin to allude to the true  _ horror  _ of IT. Which, Stanley will soon know all too well.

He opened the door. 

A room, a perfectly normal room stood before him. Four walls, a ceiling. Except for the fact that it was devoid of furniture. With one exception

A very, overwhelmingly unsettling exception.  _ The dolls. _ Hundreds of them, all lined up in neat little rows, parting at the center like the aisle of a church. They were all facing the aisle. Stanley couldn’t help the flush of fear that raised his skin into goosebumps, but who could blame him? These dolls… every single one of them different from the next, different hair, different clothes - even different sizes. Stan let his eyes wash over the unsettling scene before him. A sea of dolls. 

A strange  _ clink- _ ing sound.

Stan jumped a little, clutching at the bird book he had stuffed into the back pocket of his pants but remembering the magpies from moments ago, he dropped his hands back to his sides. The sound had spooked him… he was, after all, in a room solely designed to be a horrific shrine to a plethora of … unnervingly realistic dolls. He should go - he really should go… this is spooky. Stan Uris didn’t like this one bit… but the words he had heard from somewhere in his own head… something else’s voice had resurfaced but in his own thinking-voice this time.

_ Follow my instincts. _

Stan’s instincts, completely against his will and as much as it made his gut twist to think about - were telling him to investigate the noise. So he did - he walked through the… aisle of dolls. There were so many. All of them so … painfully realistic. They looked almost real - Stan wonders how much money these would have cost. A lot, he bets - especially the big one that he was walking past now, it was as tall as his stomach. It was the most unsettling. Partly due to the sheet that was draped over its head, it wasn’t centered, so it covered past its shoulders then draped down at the back like a veil - party because it seemed to be some collector’s edition Chucky doll - from that  _ Child’s Play _ film that Bill had insisted they all watch. Stan had  _ hated _ it. 

A whole collection of feelings ripped through him. It made him stagger to a hard stop.

SORROW HELPLESSNESS LONELY IT’S COLD IT’S SO COLD IT’S SO DARK I’M SO SCARED DARK HELP ME PLEASE I’M SORRY PLEASE HELP I’M SORRY I DIDN’T MEAN TO GO I DIDN’T MEAN IT I’M SORRY I’M SORRY I WANT TO GO HOME I WANT TO GO HOME I WANT TO GO HOME I WANT TO GO HOME I WANT TO GO HOME I WANT TO GO HOME I WANT TO GO HOME I WANT TO GO HOME IWANT TO GO HOME I WANTTO GO HOME IWANTTOGO HOME I WANTTO _ GOHOME IWANTTOGOHOMEIWANTTOGOHOMEIWANTTOGOHOMEIWANTTOGOHOMEIWAN _

Stan wrenched himself away and almost tripped over himself in his haste to move on.

A sharper, more angry CLINK-ing noise pulled his head from the covered doll. He was almost thankful for it, thankful even for the strum of fear that coursed through him because of it. He knew fear… he could understand fear. He couldn’t understand whatever series of emotions just washed over him because of that… thing, whatever it was. 

Stan walked through the parting of dolls. It led to a table, a small one - kind of looked more like a podium than a table. In fact, it was the perfect size for the little wooden box that sat atop of it. This box was important. Very important. Stan felt as though he was walking towards the Holy Grail - he could feel it in his bones. The box itself was about as run-down and dilapidated as every other part of this horror house - if not moreso. It was barely held together by thick, rusted nails that seemed to be one small draft of wind away from unlodging completely. It looked… battered, somewhat. Like it had been thrown about and hit and tossed around with reckless abandon. Some of the planks of wood were split, caved in by force. Some of the planks of wood bowed  _ outwards _ … as if something inside … no. Surely not. 

Stan wanted to tuck his hands into the pockets of his winter coat, turn on his heels and walk straight back out at the prospect of having to open this box. He had to. He knew this. Stan… wasn’t the bravest boy - not like Bill, who ran headfirst into danger, who bit back at Henry Bowers even if it cost him the colour of his cheek or the blood from his nose. Stan wasn’t brave, he got frightened a lot, he got  _ offended _ a lot - which was much worse to Stan than being frightened. There was one thing that Stan was though, a very valuable strength which would be the cornerstone of his victories. Stan was confident. Confident in himself and his decisions, in his strengths and his skills. Most importantly, now… Stan was confident of the importance of opening this box.

With two hands, one caked in dust from the handrail of the stairs, Stan pressed his hands to the top lip of the box, the hinges were at the back - he had seen. He pushed. He lifted the lid and let it swing back with a hearty  _ thunk. _ The hinges broke right in two from rust and the lid of the box clattered noisily to the floor. Stan didn’t hear it. All he could see was what lay in front of him. 

A doll. 

This doll, unlike all the other dolls - was not perfect. It was not clean and polished. This doll, with a mop of wiry, hay-like black hair and dirty freckles painting its face was a horrific caricature of what all the rest of the dolls seemed to be. Its face had a glaring hole in the side of its cheek, shattered porcelain… so it looked, anyway. Cracks ran up from the hole to its temple, and down diagonally across its mouth, stopping just above the jaw. Its face was… sickly blue. Almost green, if Stan had squinted. The worst thing about this doll… was not the cracks… not the cobwebs and spiders which had made home on its bare body...not the dead, empty eyes which seemed to be staring right at Stan. No… the doll was teeming with maggots. Horrible, wretched things that grew fat with dead flesh. Stan suppressed a gag when a particularly fat one crawled out of the doll’s parted mouth.

This doll, as offensive to Stan’s senses as it may have been. Will soon be the most important thing in Stan’s life - in many, many senses of the word. 

Stan may not have known that, but a part of him definitely sensed it because, despite the disgusting creatures covering the doll, Stan found himself reaching in. He could hardly believe it himself. The doll was heavy enough, clearly made out of something expensive.  _ If it was of such value, why was it shoved in a battered box… why was it left for the rot and decay to have at it? _ Stan couldn’t fully understand. Maybe he will someday, he thinks it might become clear to him soon. 

Stan felt embarrassment creeping up his cheeks as he held the doll the way one would a newborn, but it felt wrong to hold it any differently. He was almost … it’s almost too embarrassing to even say… he was almost afraid he would  _ hurt _ it. 

Something clicked. Two paths, destined to cross… they had met their target. Like two independent pieces of twine, destined to be knotted together to hold down something so much bigger than themselves. Such tiny, almost dismissable pieces of rope… essential to bearing down the entire universe. For this brief second… with Stan holding the other half of the puzzle in his arms… the universe stood still, in awe at the impossibility of it all. With so many things looming over the pair to prevent this. Prevent the two pieces of the puzzle fitting together - they had done it. They had done the near impossible.

At the window which Stan hadn’t previously noticed,  _ had it been there at all? _ A lone magpie flew into it with a bolt-rattling  _ thud. _ It fell to the ground and it lay there, dead on the grass.

Stan’s shock barely lasted a moment before his senses were caught in on a loud shouting from downstairs - a place Stan had forgotten even existed. It seemed so loud now… Bill shouting and Ben’s panicked answers… a parade of thunderous footsteps below him, like animals running from slaughter. Perhaps they were, since not seconds later did his name catch on his ears.

_ “Stan?!”  
_ __ Stanley!”  
_ "Where are you?”  
_ __ "STAN!”

“Upstairs!” Stan said back, his voice carrying almost purposefully down to the rest of them.

Eddie, panicked and face half-blighted with energy, hurtled himself up half of the flight of stairs in only a couple of strides, his footsteps making heavy, imposing  _ thump _ ing noises, “Belch Huggins’ car just pulled up! We gotta get outta here, move your ass, Stanley, before they see our bikes and torch the fucking house down!” 

Panicked indeed. Panicked rightly so. Stan moved briefly to put the doll back before the thought of his actions caught up with him, he couldn't. No way could he leave the doll here. There’s nothing on Earth which could ever push him to leave this doll behind. So, Stanley Uris - the boy who folds his socks and irons his underwear - unzipped his Winter coat, stuffed the doll inside of it, zipped it back up and hauled ass out of the doll room, down the stairs and out of the wretched house. 

The group collected their bikes and made wind as fast as they could, fire burning in their lungs and their legs crying out as they tried to out-cycle the eyeline of the resident bullies of Derry, Bill cried out a soaring,  _ “Hi-yo Silver, away!” _ Even as his chest lurched for breath. They cycled out of Neibolt street, out of the vortex of Number Twenty-Nine and away from the heavy clouds which had pulled in around it.

Outside the decaying walls of Twenty Nine, where a dead magpie laid not moments ago, there was nothing but grass.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to thank everyone for reading and especially to Hal @birdboyinthedeadlights for being kind enough to trudge through this and Beta it for me! 
> 
> Please leave comments and kudos if you enjoyed and dont forget to smash that mothafuckin' like button


	3. Chapter 2: AD STELLAM CAERULEAM

_ ‘The turtle? What in the goddamn hell did ‘the Turtle’ know?’  _ Stan thought as he tore through the entryway of the Uris household, up the carpeted stairs, and through his bedroom door.  _ ‘What the hell was that? God? Is that it, was I hearing God? No… God surely wouldn’t pull my guts up to a stupid porcelain doll. I need to get it out it’s so gross oh good grief oh no-’ _

Stan flustered with the zip of his coat, his hands so frantic that he kept knocking it out of his own way. The maggots were crawling under his skin, he could  _ feel _ them. The thought made him blow out a shaky breath to suppress his heaving gut.  _ Gotcha.  _ He ripped the zip down with enough force to blow the bottom of it out and send the little silver key ripping off the chain. He didn’t even think twice about dropping it to the floor because he suddenly realised - if his coat opened - there was nothing to support the doll and as much as the cold, maggot-coated puppet creature made him squirm, he definitely didn’t want it smashing all over his bedroom floor.

Stan managed to grab it by its wrist, barely in time to stop its legs colliding with the ground. It hung limply - well, how else had he expected it to hang? The doll slowly rotated in his grasp, clearly its shoulder was some sort of ball joint. It turned slowly, as if being propelled by the lightest breeze… until it stopped dead. Right where its lopsided head had lined its eyes up perfectly with Stan’s own. Stan held the doll a little further from himself and looked desperately around his room for something,  _ anything _ to deposit the doll in. 

The issue was, however, everything in Stan’s room already had its place. Perfectly manicured to be as functional is it was nice to look at. Stan didn’t have a particularly large room by any means. He had a fairly decent sized bed, though. Somewhere between a twin and a double - but not  _ quite  _ as big as a double. He wasn’t sure what the term for it was, but it was big enough plenty for sleepovers. Eddie or Ben or Bill would fit in nicely beside him, with enough room for them to turn over without brushing against each other all that much. Beverly wasn’t allowed to spend the night at their sleepovers, to the upset of the rest of the group. Beverly always remembered all of the rules at game night, without her it was a lot of guessing and house-rules made up on the spot. 

The bed was pushed up against the wall, his only window breaching the end of it. Sometimes, when Stan was having difficulties sleeping, he would take his pillows and put them on the end of his bed and crack his curtains open. He would fall asleep with the counts of stars in his head and the moonlight paling on his skin. Sometimes he would sit at the footboard, a pillow softening the harsh wood at his back and read his books or do his homework while looking out the window. Something about looking out of the window provided him comfort and he always found himself drawn to a particular house that he could just  _ barely _ ever see. It was maybe three streets down the way, bracketed between other houses and big, heavy trees - but he could see a small part of the house, a little dormer window. Something about it… seeing only this little window in between a chorus of other houses and an underline of heavy maple trees. The dormer was painted a rich blue. Stan didn’t think the rest of the house is painted as such, he would have noticed it by the colour while cycling around Derry if it had. 

The light was never on, he noticed. He wondered if anyone lived there at all. 

The rest of Stan’s room was little to wander at. Neat and tidy. A bedside table which had nothing but a little silver table lamp on it. Its drawers empty apart from his retainer and a box of tissues. His dresser had a pair of photo frames and a little baseball trophy he had received when his Elementary school made it to the district finals. Its newest addition was a little potted aloe vera plant that Bill had given him.  _ ‘Muh-muh-maybe it’ll make your ruh-ruh-room look lived-in and luh-luh-less like a catalogue puh-picture’. _ His bookshelf, was of course, more or less full and ordered alphabetically. Not so much as a speck of dust was ever out of place in Stanley’s room with its baby blue wallpaper and its soft chestnut floor. 

A maggot fell from the doll’s mouth and onto Stan’s boot.

Stan took another steeled breath and forced himself not to squirm. They were on his skin they were on his skin they were on his  _ skin. _ Stan felt the wriggling fat little things crawling  _ all _ over him. Every little patch of skin he had was being ravaged by them. Stan took a stiff step towards the door beside his end table - his ensuite. 

Stan was never as grateful for an ensuite as he was now - he could never have been able to deal with sharing a bathroom with someone.... and a  _ toilet. _ The thought made his stomach curl at the best of times. Now, his stomach is curling for a different type of reason altogether, mainly the maggot that was writing on his foot. He grimaced. This was perhaps the most disgusting situation Stanley had ever been introduced to. Maggots were the very  _ symbol _ of rot and decay and wretchedness - and he had one crawling on his damned boot. Stan looked at the doll in his arms and his head jumped between it and his foot. He caught notice of a little fat pebble of white worming on his jumper and he made a very gut-decision to rush to place the doll in the tub. Despite his haste, he was gentle.

Stan lifted the toilet lid and kicked the maggot off of his boot and into the water. God they were all over him. He could  _ feel  _ them. He yanked the cupboard of the sink open and pulled out a pair of yellow rubber gloves, Stan kept about half a dozen pairs under the sink for cleaning. He ripped the pack open with his teeth and shoved his hands into them as quickly as he could. With that, Stan meticulously went over every single inch of himself and picked off any of the wormy little…..  _ things  _ as he could. From his jumper, to his scarf, down his pant legs and through the inside and outside of his coat - all in all he had lifted four from his person and flicked them into the toilet. He double-checked.

Triple checked.

Quadruple checked.

Then he was satisfied that he was in the clear. Stan shed his coat and hung it on the hook of the door. 

He could almost… feel the doll boring holes into him. God, he was ridiculous. Stan scrubbed at his face. It’s just a stupid doll. There was no reason to even bring it home,  _ why did I do that? What am I gonna do with it? I can’t just keep it in my room. I definitely can’t give it away. _ The thought made his stomach burn. That’s the issue - what was it about this  _ stupid  _ hunk of porcelain that had him feeling all types of emotions.  _ Emotions and feelings that no other person has ever truly felt… and why do I know that? Why do I feel that truth inside me? How could that possibly be true and yet… _ Stan turned to look at the doll. Their eyes met.  _ I know.  _

The voice echoed in his head again. Not the way it had at Neibolt… just a memory of it.

_ Follow your instincts. _

Stan wasn’t quite sure why, but he followed the advice. No harm could come of it, he reasoned. Maybe he was a little right - but he was equally a little wrong… but who was Stanley Uris to know that yet?

Stan thought briefly about boiling water over his kitchen stove and sinking the doll in it to kill the maggots but he felt bad at the thought of it. Whether the feeling was extended towards to doll or the maggots, he wasn't sure. Instead, Stanley hopped down the stairs and into the garage for Pesticide. His mother had used it for the pink carnations in their almost obsessively-manicured front lawn after a sudden bout of insects had gnawed through many of their petals. The insects were unlike anything Stanley or his mother had ever seen. Caterpillar-looking things with sharp, beetle-like pincers and a splodge of red on the back of its almost impossibly black body. After Stanley and his mother had sprinkled the dusty pesticide around the coronations, they immediately began to contort within themselves. Writhing around like salted slugs.  _ ‘Leave for twenty - forty minutes’ _ the box had said. So they did. They hadn’t been able to find any bodies of the horrible insects when they returned.

Maybe the pesticide wasn’t all that great after all, Stan thought as he rounded out from the garage and into the hallway which would lead him to the stairs. 

Being away from the doll had given him some breathing room, which for some reason, was difficult to do with the doll near him. What exactly had happened in Neibolt? Stan had so many questions flickering though his head but they all flickered through it so quickly that he hadn’t been able to even lay thoughts on a tangible question. The voice? The Turtle? The quarry? And God… the  _ dolls. _ The dolls were … strange. Strange in a different way than his doll. Well, not  _ his  _ doll. The doll he had stolen. Oh God… he had stolen a doll from the collection. Would he be cursed? Would he- 

Stan near collided into his mother - worries blinding his surroundings. Andrea was a pleasant woman, comforting and graceful. Everyone always said Stan resembled his mother more than his father. He didn’t particularly think much of it, if anything, he would be a little offended that people say he looks like a  _ girl,  _ Stan would later appreciate the dirty blonde curls that people would say shone like gold in the Summer… and the dimple on his left cheek.. and the little triangle of freckles he has on his stomach, which his mother had told him once she had in the same place. His mother smiled at him and steadied him with a gentle hand on his shoulder. 

“Stanley? What are you getting up to? I heard you running up the stairs when you came in,” She said, not in the scolding way that Bill’s mother would speak to her son, or low warning tone that Mrs. Kaspbrak would use - Andrea just asked because she would quite like to know and Stan respected that greatly. 

“Sorry, mom. My - uh… my coat got dirty and I wanted to take it off,” Stan said, stumbling over himself for an excuse for his heavy footsteps, feeling a little guilty for lying.

“Oh no,” She frowned and squeezed his shoulder a little, “Would you like me to take it to the Laundromat for you?”

“No, it’s fine. I cleaned it already,” He said.

Andrea smiled and pat the crown of his head but her smile faltered, “You’re not wearing your kippah.” 

Stan squirmed under her gaze. He didn’t wear it out anymore - he hadn’t in a while, not since Patrick Hockstettar had ripped it from his head when he had been at the urinal and dropped it into the basin beside Stan and promptly started to relieve himself on it. The entire ordeal had been equally as upsetting as it was disgusting. The fact that Patrick had stared him down the entire time had made him all too hasty to zip himself up and run out of the toilets. He knew what that look meant. 

_ It’ll be you next, Stanley Urine. _

The humiliation had made him cower. He knew he shouldn’t let the Bowers gang force him to leave a piece of himself in his dresser drawer, but it had made him an easy target and the Bowers gang seemed to take it as a personal offense whenever Stan wore it. 

“No, mom… I forgot,” He lied.

“Stanley… you understand how it would look,” She said, meeting his eye, “If members of the congregation were to see the Rabbi’s son without his kippah. You understand, don’t you?” 

“Yes, mom. I slept in this morning and forgot, is all.” 

She considered him for a moment before nodding and reaching over to press a kiss into his curls, “If you don’t like wearing it, I won’t say to your father. You can take it off around me, if you wish,” She said into his hair. 

Stan found himself wrapping his arms around her and squeezing a quick hug. She thought Stan was ashamed… or falling away from religion. That wasn’t it at all, he thinks anyway. He’d have to come back to that thought after he figures out this whole  _ ‘Turtle’ _ business. 

“It’s alright, I don’t mind wearing it - I swear.”

“Alright,” She pulled away from him and smoothed out her dress as she rose back to height. She straightened Stan’s jumper as she did so - before Stan even had a chance to do so himself, “Now… do tell me what you’re doing with a box of pesticide tucked under your arm.”

Stan took the box from his armpit and looked over the gaudish yellow packaging. Stanley had found himself becoming fairly good at lying. He had to lie about all sorts to all sorts of people. 

_ ‘No Father, I didn’t lose my Kippah - the pin pulled the thread of it… that’s why I need a new one...’ _

_ ‘No Miss, I’m afraid I don’t know anything about Beverly Marsh smoking behind the bleachers. I don’t think she’s ever touched a cigarette in her life…’ _ _   
_ _ ‘Sorry I’m home late, I was in the library and lost track of time...’  _

The words fell all too easy from his mouth, not without a lace of guilt, “I found a bug-eating my aloe vera plant earlier… I just want to make sure there are no others along with it.” 

She nodded and tapped the top of the box, “Make sure to dilute it, otherwise you’ll just kill the plant, too.” 

“Dilute it?” 

“Mix it in with some warm water and use it to water your plant,” She looked out towards their front lawn, “I learnt that the hard way ...almost all of my carnations died…”

  
“The garden still looks nice,” He said, “It always looks nice.” 

This made her beam with pride, she gave Stan a genuine smile that one creep onto Stan’s face along with it, “Thank you,” She looked at him for a moment, the way mother’s often do when they look at their children, chest swimming and overflowing suddenly with a very special type of love. She stopped herself before she would begin to cry, “Go on, go take care of your plant. I love you, Ahuv.” 

“I love you too,” And with that, Stan went back up the stairs and into his ensuite.

He set the box on the floor and knelt down beside the tub, taking a moment to make sure no creepy-crawlies had decided to venture up and out of the tub when he was gone. They hadn’t. Stan undressed the doll. It was wearing a simple pair of shorts and a cheap-looking t-shirt. Stan had never heard of  _ Freese’s Department Store.  _ Stan forced the plug into the bath and turned on the hot tap. Stan felt it grow from cold to warm over his fingertips, the pipes sputtering every now and again. It then grew from warm to hot. Then hot to very hot. Stan considered the doll for a moment and turned the knob a little for cold. It seemed to run warm enough to dissolve the pesticide, at least. 

Cool enough to not burn the doll... Stan was growing exasperated at himself for these thoughts. He felt like there was a child with an overactive imagination caught inside of him, caring about not hurting this glorified puppet. He still pulled the doll away from the tap when he noticed the water was spluttering out directly onto its face. The hole in the side of its face had unnaturally spluttered out water when Stan moved it but Stan paid it little mind and focused more on emptying the remainder of the box of pesticide under the stream of water. It fizzed a little as it made contact before dissipating under the movement of the water. The remainder of the box had actually been about nine-tenths of it, and Stanley still doubted whether or not it would be enough. 

A handful of maggots floated out of the hole of the mouth of the doll as the water finally covered the doll. They were dead and Stan shot back. 

_ Absolutely revolting. What on Earth have I gotten myself into? _

Stan leaned over the tub and turned the taps off. The water continued to ripple for a bit as it settled. Stan was leaning directly over the doll. His hair fell down his face and shadowed it as he looked down into the rippling water. The doll’s face warped and warbled through the motions… and Stan could swear the doll looked less blue-green than it had when he first saw it. It looked more… pink. More flesh-like, even.    
  
The rippling water made the doll appear to blink at him for a moment and Stan felt his hands twitch. There was something deeply unsettling about it. Not scary, necessarily. It didn’t really  _ scare _ him. There was just something overtly…  _ off _ about it. Something that just kept Stan a little on edge whenever he looked at it. Stan wondered if the voice would tell him why. The voice didn’t tell him anything. Stan knew it wouldn’t. The voice was gone. For now? Forever? Stan wasn’t sure. Maybe he should try. 

Stan decided to try when he showers. He had pulled off his jumper and his shirt before he decided to drop a towel over the doll. He didn’t like the way it was looking at him when he was undressing. It wasn’t  _ looking _ at him, of course - it was a doll. But it was just lying there, underwater. Stan always somehow managed to meet its dark eyes. He wonders if it was like one of those paintings that follow you around the room with its eyes. He isn’t quite certain if that’s possible with a 3D object, though. Deep down he knew it wasn’t. He ignored that part of his rationale and finished undressing and got into the shower. 

Stan let the spray of the water drench his hair and drip down his face. He grabbed his loofah and scrubbed away at his skin. The dust, the dirt, the grime, the shadows of Neibolt; he wanted it all gone. As the water rushed down him and collected the soap to be pulled to the drain, Stan could feel his skin lighten away from dark grime and ashy dust. There hadn’t been any on his skin in the first place, of course, but Stanley had learnt a long time ago that letting the feelings come and go was a lot easier than trying to change the way his mind approaches disorder and uncleanliness. 

He continued his shower until his mind was a little lighter, knowing he was clean with shampoo froth running down the nape of his neck.

His mind felt lighter, freer. 

He could try again. Stan pulled his head back to clear his face of suds and wiped at his eyes. He blinked them open and took a spare glance over to the bathtub, the bath towel clung to the doll. Stan turned back to the shower. Stan tried to rationalise it all, grasping at straws to explain the series of events that lead him to having a broken doll lying in his bathtub. Hallucinations, perhaps?

It was a weak reach for an explanation. Stanley knew better. He knew they were no hallucinations. The power and the authoritative gust that blew through his insides with the voice left no room for dispute. It was a fact that felt like the core of reality. If Stan were to pick and pull at it… it would unravel. The galaxies would unweb and the planets would pop out of order and fall through the bottom of the universe. The cosmos would ember and fizzle out into nothing. 

_ But how did he know that? _

These facts were the simple facts of reality - secret not through whispers and sealed lips, but through being untold. A secret not between people but between the whispers of the forest on a breezy night and between the wash of gust over a silent ocean. Between the final wink of sunlight over the horizon and the dark side of the moon. Between the very fabric of time and the grounds of the Earth. Nothing that would ever suggest a young boy such as Stanley Uris would be privy to it. 

_ Why do I know who you are? Why did you speak to me?  _

Nothing.

_ Are you God?  _

Nothing.

Stan knocked his head into the tiles with frustration.  _ Do  _ you  _ care if I wear my kippah? _

Nothing.

_ Why did I bring the doll home? _

The drain below his feet spluttered up some of the suds with a heavy gurgling sound.

Stan batted away the suds around it with his foot but nothing seemed amiss, so he finished his shower and stepped out of the comforting glass box and into the open vulnerability of his bathroom. Stan decides, quite unlike him, to dry himself off and put on his sleep clothes in his bedroom rather than in the warm steam of the bathroom. He leaves the bathroom light on when he leaves.

As Stan curls into his bed, he hears the pipes in the house clatter and ring through the walls and briefly wonders why his parents would decide to put the heating on at this hour. And when he hears a strange high-pitched sound like fork on a china plate swallowed by the lapping of water he simply turns away from it and sleeps facing the wall. 

-

**THE URIS RESIDENCE, 05:52AM**

Stanley Uris did not have a pleasant nights sleep. He woke up feeling as though he had barely closed his eyes, with sweat sticking his pyjamas to his skin and matting his hair to his forehead. His blankets had been twisted and wrought in his sleep and they twisted awkwardly around his legs.

He woke up suddenly and with a start. Panic crept up from his toes all the way up to his ears which strained and prickled at every little noise. Birds singing, humming of the streetlamps, ticking of the big clock in the hallway. They were like darts of poison launched into his eardrums. 

Stan had woken up in the brunt of a nightmare and as soon as he had collected the memory of it, it had fallen from his mind into whatever strange place forgotten dreams and nightmares go. Wherever that place is, it can stay there, Stan thought. He wiped sweat from his upper lip and got out of bed.

It had been the worst nightmare of his life - even if he couldn’t remember it. His gut was still heavy with a concoction of terrible feelings. It wasn’t dissimilar to the way he felt when he walked past that large doll in Neibolt. It was different though…..different and yet overwhelmingly familiar. Like how sadness on Eddie wears with downcast eyes and a soft voice and swells into anger before it crowns with tears, like a feather being swept into a riptide. And yet sadness on Bill wears with red stinging eyes and a sticky throat and all too many silent strings of wet down his cheeks, heavy and prominent like a fat storm cloud. The same underlying emotions but with very different presentations.

Stan dragged himself to the bathroom and the light nearly blinded him when he opened the door. He took a minute to collect himself before blinking through the splotches on his retinas. He washed his face and as he let the water drip down his jaw and into the sink. With his hands gripping the edge of it, he looked over the doll in the bathtub which Stan suspected had something to do with his restless night.

He said as much, with a quiet voice that Stan could barely even hear in his own head, “I bet this is all because of you. You’re cursed,” He wiped his face off with a towel and folded it back over the rack and stepped towards the tub. The towel had sunk away from the doll and twisted around its legs. Stan looked into its eyes. The doll looked back.

“Maybe not cursed. Haunted?” 

Stan reckons he should probably set about finishing the cleaning job, so he lifted the doll from under its armpits and set it upright in the tub. Stan pulled the plug and waited for all the dead maggots which had floated to the top of the water to be sucked down the drain out of Stan’s sight and out of his mind. He did a once-over of the doll. He felt a little embarrassed as he opened up its legs to make sure none had lodged themselves in the joint of its hip. 

“Sorry ...normally I’d take you out for dinner first,” Stan said. It didn’t make him feel much less embarrassed. He reached up to grab the facecloth that he had just been using on himself and ran it under the tap of the bath. He rubbed it gently at the doll’s face, taking extra care where it had cracked and shattered. He wiped carefully at its mouth-

The crack had gone through it, had it not? Stan swore the crack from the gaping hole had extended past its mouth and down to its chin. Stan wiped at it again, as if it would magically appear. It didn’t.

Stan sat back on his heels, “If you are haunted, just please be a friendly ghost,” He paused for a bit and moved back to wash the doll, worrying that the overnight bath hadn’t been enough to lift off the dirt and dust of Neibolt House, “My dad will be so mad if I brought home a demon.” 

Stan continued to scrub at the doll and even though he doubted that there was all that much to clean at all, it made him feel better knowing he had washed over every inch of the doll. Even over all the little joints of its fingers. Stan scrubbed over the dolls chest for a good minute or so before he realised the ‘flecks of dirt’ that he had been trying to get rid of had in fact been freckles. That unsettles him a little. He’s known freckles on the face of dolls… he can understand the logic behind that. He can’t wrap his head around why someone would go through the trouble of painting freckles onto the  _ chest  _ of a doll. No one would see it underneath its clothes.

Ah yes, clothes. The doll should have clean clothes. For now, Stan wrapped the doll in a towel and laid him to the side while he ripped open a fresh pair of gloves and scrubbed the bathtub. The gentle sliver of sun thickening through the window told Stan that he didn’t have much longer before he would have to leave for school.

Stan finished scrubbing the bath and deposited the gloves into his wastebasket and lifted the doll into his room and onto his lap as he sat down on his bed. There, Stan towel-dried its hair as best he could. He couldn’t quite tell what it was made of but it seemed to work more or less the same as his own hair as it frizzed slightly with static. Cleaning it made it seem almost curly, not matted and dry as it had been beforehand.

When Stan was happy enough that the hair wouldn’t drip with water or grow damp and smelly in the cold air, he wrapped the doll in a fresh towel and perched him on the reading chair that sat in the corner of his room, in between his desk and his bookshelf. Stan didn’t dare think of what his friends would say if they discovered his concerns about the modesty of a  _ doll. _ He didn’t have to think because he knew what their reactions would be all too well.

Stan went back to the bathroom and collected the clothes he had removed from the doll. They’re awfully plain. It was an odd choice in apparel for a doll, granted but Stan was hardly here to judge whatever strange reasonings that the collector had going through his head. Stan simply folded them up and slipped them into his backpack.

He would stop at the Laundromat on his way home from school. Sure, it was a little out of his way - having to take the turn off of Main Street opposite from where he lives but it was hardly as though he was planning on cycling up to Bangor. Stan shuffled some of his schoolbooks around inside his backpack to make room for the clothes and he felt his neck pringle at the feeling of being watched. He didn’t turn around. 

“I’m going to wash your clothes at the Laundromat. It’s called Bubbley’s, it’s about four blocks down off of Main Street… I’d say I’ll be back around five o’clock, provided none of my friends have made plans-” he cut himself off. He truly was losing his mind, talking to the doll. He said as such to the empty air in front of him and shook his head at himself for being so silly. 

Stan hoped that he would have enough spare change for it, it didn’t cost a whole lot… but Stan didn’t  _ have  _ a whole lot. If not, he supposes he could just hand-wash it and let it dry over the heater although with the cold and damp air it would probably take quite a while. All that mattered was for the doll to have clean clothes. Stan reassures himself that it’s because he doesn’t want anything dirty in his room, which may be true, but he knows by the haphazard glance over his shoulder at the doll sitting on his chair that it was more for  _ it  _ than for himself. He zipped up his backpack and made his way out the door. He faulted at the threshold. He turned back and grabbed his kippah from his dresser and pinned it in place.

The doll watched him as he left.

\--

**BUBBLEY’S LAUNDROMAT, 4:15PM**

Stan was alone. He sat on one of the uncomfortable plastic benches of Bubbley’s Laundromat. The lights of the Laundromat were glaring and cold and seemed to bubble out into the dusk with heavy globs of fluorescent light. Stan is sitting doing homework, passing the time as the doll’s tiny clothes spin around rather lonely in the dryer. The dryer is humming lowly, a sound which Stan had always somewhat liked… it fills the silence but not obnoxiously so. It muffles the silence without pulling much attention to itself. Stan didn’t even mind the occasional thump that would come from the dryer - the dryers were old and Stan was empathetic and patient enough to understand.

He hadn’t intended to go alone. Stanley didn’t really like going many places alone - alone made you a target, not just to the Bower’s gang - but to himself. It was a lot easier to fall into his head when he was alone. That was Stanley - a boy stuck in his own head with little but anxieties to show for it. He had asked Bill and he smiled apologetically and said he was going to see a new horror film at the Aladdin with Eddie. Eddie looked equally as perturbed as he did excited about it. He asked Beverly and she smiled with tired eyes and said she had to be home straight after school and Stan understood. Well, not really. None of them  _ really  _ understood but none of them felt the need to ask and Beverly didn’t feel the need to tell. He asked Ben who looked as though he was about to say yes before suddenly remembering something and changed his answer before it had been half-way out his lips. 

The light above Stan flickered and buzzed. The heavy snowfall outside melted to rain and the sound of rain bouncing off of the window harmonized with the dryer. Stan felt anxiety bubbling in his throat, which he deemed rather peculiar because Stanley liked the sound of the rain pattering off of windows and pounding down on roofs and washing down over the pavements. For some reason, the sound just filled him with nerves.    
  
Stan tried to concentrate on his homework but it proved fruitless as his brain was flush with images of water. Quick, almost too quick to identify splashes of water. It was murky and overcoming, bubbling around him violently like a jacuzzi cranked up to the highest setting. Stan got a flash of something else. Something sinister. Two eyes stared into his gut… amber and cold with hate and hot with desire… they were closing in. They were bubbling up through the bubbles and webbing and pulsing around the frantic shifting of the water. They were getting closer. They were human in appearance but he knew better. Closer and closer and closer until it grabbed his ankle and-

_ Bing _ ! The cycle had finished.

Stan slammed the textbook that he had been holding shut. His fingers indented in the cover where he had been holding it. 

And just like that… the fear and torment that had washed over him had left as soon as it came. Like watching a horror movie and near wetting your pants during, then feeling nothing but giddiness as soon as the theatre doors open and the light comes flooding in. Stan wasn’t left with giddiness, though. He was left with a boatload of questions and a frustratingly short list of answers. 

  
Did the Turtle show him that?

No. Stan would know if the Turtle spoke to him. This was no act of the strange Turtle creature that has made Stan second-guess his righteous holding of the Torah. This was something else. Something different altogether, something heavy with grief...lonely, even. 

Outside, the rain had become snow again, and Stan was left wondering whether it had been raining at all.    
  
He packed up his school things neatly and tried his best to smooth over the harsh indents of his textbook and slipped them back into his backpack. He opened the dryer and the smell of artificial lavender offended his senses. Stan hated the smell of the cheap stuff the Laundromat provided - his mother used one that smelt of fresh linen and lilies - a lot less sweet and a lot less flamboyant. 

He pulled the clothes out and examined them carefully. They seemed to have cleaned fairly well. The top - which Stan had originally thought was grey - turned out to be a sort of blue-ish, washed-out colour. Stan closed the top of the dryer and folded the little clothes and slid them carefully into his backpack. He was a little concerned that they would crease but there was little he could do about that. 

Stan left the laundromat and hunched himself to breathe into his scarf. The snow wasn’t light and melodic like in those terrible Hallmark Christmas movies that Ben insists on making them watch. Ben loves them, Stan thinks he’s seen the same movie about six times but no… it’s a different movie. Every time. They’re all the same to him. Anyway, the snow wasn’t like that - it wasn’t blissful and romantic and it didn’t pepper itself in Stan’s hair for him to dust off when he walked into the warmth of his front door with a bowl of hot soup waiting to warm his belly. The snow was heavy and stung with the cold of it on his face. The ground was wet with a mushy mix of ice and snow. Stan had saddled himself and cycled but he only got to the end of the block before he was skidding out of control every so often, having to stomp his foot down to steady himself, so he walked his bike beside him. 

The streetlamps barely lit his way, the snow was clouding the light too much for it to help Stan’s vision all that much which only became all the more concerning when he arrived at his shortcut. Across the play park. 

See, Stan  _ could _ go around it, but with the roadworks down the road beside it having blocked off his path, he would have to walk the whole way around the block of houses which would add not only time to his journey but it was out of the line of sight of the roads and Stan deemed it unsafe - who knows what kind of trouble could be waiting for him in alleyways? 

Stan steeled himself and walked his bike through the gate of the park. It was all gated off - only by a fence waist-height, but it was restrictive all the same. Stan kept his head down to look at his footing, making sure to avoid any patches of ice or rocks that could send him sprawling. Stan wonders if Eddie and Bill are shivering their butts off in the Aladdin; which never turned their heat on to save on electric bills. Eddie could only imagine Eddie firing off about hypothermia and pneumonia Bill shoving the straw of his soda into his mouth on an inhale to get him to be quiet. 

Stan’s mind stayed peacefully away from thoughts of turtles and dolls as he thought about his friends for a bit. He also thought about the homework he had been working through and he wondered if someone would be able to help him through a question he found exceptionally difficult. Stan almost walked into the swingset but he didn’t have all that much time to feel surprised by it.

The heavy and frantic crunching of snow caught his attention all too late as something collided purposefully into the back of him. Stan fell to the ground and barely had time to put his hands out in front of him to break his fall. He let out a shout as he fell. It was echoed by a twisted and harsh laugh. A laugh Stan knew all too well, he recognised it with a drop of his stomach.

Bowers.

  
Henry pressed a boot into the small of Stan’s back.  _ Hard. _ Hard enough for Stan to huff his last breath of air into the ground and try to claw away.

“If it isn’t Stanley Urine. What’re you doin’ out on your own in the dark? You meetin’ up with your little friends?” Henry’s voice was mocking and grated every part of Stan’s body. Stan wormed under his shoe but Henry only pressed down harder, “You gone deaf  _ and _ dumb, flamer? Answer me.” 

“Yes.” Stan lied through gritted teeth, he twisted his head to look at Henry - an action he wished he hadn’t done. Henry looked half-mad… like Stan had given him some sort of great offense. Which he hadn’t, after all, Stan had simply been walking home. Henry Bowers is a boy so caught up in his own spiteful little world that he sees anyone enjoying themselves, he takes it personally. If Henry has to be miserable then so does everyone else and hey, Stan was an easy target. All of them were. 

“Where are ya’s going? You all gonna take turns havin’ a ride on the town bicycle?” Henry said. Stan’s hands fisted in the snow. 

“Don’t call her that.” That was Beverly. His  _ friend. _ Stan didn’t like when Henry called Ben  _ fatty  _ or  _ tits _ , or when he called Bill  _ stuttering Bill  _ or  _ retard _ and he especially didn’t like it when he called Eddie  _ fairy  _ or a  _ fruit _ . But Stan hated whenever Henry - or anyone, for that matter - spoke about Beverly like that. She always got this sad, far-away look on her face that she thinks none of them notice. They do. They all notice. 

Henry let out a laugh at that. It was cold and short. He lunged forward and pressed his knee into Stan’s back and forced his face into the snow. Henry’s hand bruised into the side of Stan’s face and the snow burned the other side of it. Stan muffled the quick, instinctual cry of pain that had almost came out of him. He sucked his lips into his mouth and made little  _ ‘mmmph’ _ noises instead. 

“What’re you gonna do, cry? You gonna cry?” Henry twisted Stan’s face  _ hard _ into the snow. It was burning so much. The snow wasn’t soft, it wasn’t powdery and pillowy. It was hard and icy, near frozen solid. It cut coldness into his face and Stan could swear it was rubbing his fucking  _ skin  _ off. Stan kicked violently at Henry and tried to force his arms, which were crushed under himself, to lift him up off of the ground for leverage. It didn’t work. Henry was too strong, had too much power. Henry had him in such a position that Stan was utterly helpless. Helpless to whatever Henry Bowers had planned for him. The thought cast his mind back to Ben, with a scar on his stomach still red and angry. 

Henry could do whatever the hell he wanted right now and there was no one around to stop him.

Stan did let out a sudden and violent hitch of breath at that and his eyes began to water. Henry could  _ kill _ him. Henry has said he was going to kill him. Henry was so unhinged and such a brute that he probably wouldn’t think twice about it. He could take the knife from his jeans and stab Stan in the stomach and leave him to stain into the snow. 

_ The knife. _

Stan forgot Henry carried a knife. A great big heavy bowie knife. A sob wrecked out of him and he fought against Henry again. 

“Holy shit -” Henry grabbed the fat of Stan’s cheeks in hand and  _ pulled _ , lifting Stan’s head off of the ground so he could get a better look. Stan screwed his eyes shut. “You are! You’re crying!” Henry let out a barking laugh and he slammed Stan’s head into the ground. Stan’s head exploded into fiery shots of pain and he grappled weakly at the ground, “God… you’re such a fucking faggot.” 

Stan gave up grappling against the snow. He was. He  _ was  _ a faggot. 

He was a great big ol’ fairy and he hated not being able to deny it. He had thoughts for a while but he hadn’t  _ known _ until they started to grow up and get things like body hair and body odour and erections and suddenly Bill was  _ very _ interested in girls - in  _ Beverly _ , for a while but that had stopped almost as quickly as it had started. Stan found himself admiring the men in movies rather than panting at the half-naked ladies. Appreciating men he saw walking down the street in tight-fitting shirts and aftershave that was dark and musky. He even looked at Bill and found himself staring at his strong calves as he tore across Derry on Silver or gazing a little too long at Eddie’s smattering of freckles. Beverly had freckles too and Stan could  _ see _ her beauty, but it didn’t entrance him… it didn’t pull him in. 

Stan could almost argue that this was a bed of his own doing. But deep in his gut, he knew that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair on himself. 

“Bet you and all the other little queers go and suck each other off, huh?” 

Stan didn’t reply. He knew not to reply. You just take what Henry gives you and you thank the universe if you walk away without any bruises.

Henry’s hand suddenly shot into Stan’s hair - and Stan felt ice scale up his back when he realised what Henry was reaching for.

“I doubt your Daddy will be pleased about his son sucking off the other Derry poofs with his jew-cap on,” and with that, Henry ripped it from Stan’s head. Stan cried out as the pins pulled painfully at his hair when they were yanked out.

“Give it back!” His voice was quiet and cracked when he spoke, wet with tears.

Henry took the kippah in his hand and used it to scoop up a mound of snow. Stan barely had time to close his eyes before Henry smashed it into his cheek and began rubbing.  _ Hard. _ Stan let out an anguished cry as Henry scrubbed at his face for so long that the snow had melted. Stan's cheek was blistered with red and he fought against Henry with as much strength as he could muster.

Henry threw the kippah away and with a mighty swingback he slapped Stan’s ear with his open palm as hard as he could. 

Stan’s eyes blew open and a choked sound left his throat. 

That’s done it. Stan was deaf. Henry had burst his eardrum. The ringing was deafening and Stan found himself growing near faint. His vision blackened around the edges. Stan lay limp in the snow and that, for reasons unclear to even Bowers himself, only infuriated him more.

“You stupid fuckin’ freak! I’m gonna burn down your family’s entire fuckin’ freak church like they did to that Negro shithole back when Derry was normal. Your days are numbered, you and your faggot friends!” Henry’s voice cascaded into great big bellows, shouting so loud that Stan prayed someone would hear him. But this was Derry… if anyone had heard Henry Bowers screaming bloody murder at Stan, no one cared. Henry spat on Stan’s face and Stan tried to wipe it on his shoulder.  _ Get it off, get it off, get it off. _

Henry laughed, maniacal and near crazed with anger, “I’ll get it for you,” and with that, Henry grabbed a fistful of snow and continued scrubbing Stan’s cheek with it. 

Fistful after fistful of snow was scrubbed into Stan’s cheek. Stan screamed and cried and kicked at Henry with the pain of it. It seared his cheeks. He swears he could feel it in his teeth. He swears that Henry scrubbed right through his cheek and into his mouth. The pain was unbearable. He hardly noticed the ringing in his ears and the shooting pain coming from his eardrum. Henry Bowers scrubbed and scrubbed and laughed all the while doing it. 

Just when Stan was sure he was going to die from the pain - a cop car slowly pulled onto the street, in clear view of both boys. It drove slow, barely edging its way down the street at all. With a sharp swear, Henry jumped up, using Stan’s face as leverage and kicking him swiftly in the ribcage as he scampered off - a kid being caught by Mommy and Daddy playing with something he shouldn’t be. 

Stan didn’t even have the energy to watch Henry run off. He just lay where he was for a moment. The cop car stopped as it drove past Stan. It stopped and through the heavy fluster of snow he could see movement inside the car. It then drove away again as slowly as it had driven up. 

With the knowledge that no one was going to help him, Stan shakily stood up on his own two feet and wiped away his tears with the heel of his hand. It was hard to wipe away tears when they hadn’t yet stopped but he kept doing it anyway. The pain in his face was overwhelming. Stan picked up his bike and walked it down the last remaining blocks until he was on Main Street, he could barely see where he was going, his eyes near blind with pain.

As he got onto Main Street which was a blizzard of lights and gaudy decorations and streetlamps that seemed to cut through the snow a lot better than the last ones had, Stan walked down the pavement, not even catching the attention of any of the adults who walked past him. Stan cupped his face and tried his best to warm his scrubbed cheek with one hand and walked his bike with the other. When he pulled his hand away he noticed it painted red with his own blood.

Every loud rev of a car engine made Stan jump and look over his shoulders with the fear that it would be Belch Huggins’. It never was but Stan still crumpled into himself a little as the car would drive past… just in case.   
  
Stan walked home, like a wounded animal, skittish and with his tail between his legs. Stan parked his bike up at the bike stand beside his front door and crept in as silently as he could. He toed off his boots at the door and tiptoed in his socks up to his room and when the door shut behind him he shucked off his backpack and he crumpled like a paper doll against the door and cried. 

He cried big, fat tears that stung his cheek when they passed. He cried because he had been  _ alone,  _ he had been  _ afraid _ and he had been hurt. Stan hated being afraid. He hated it. It made him feel weak and childish and yet he had little control over it. Beverly had once told him that being brave is more about doing things  _ despite _ your fear, not because it hadn’t been there at all. Stan told her that may be true, but it’s hard to feel brave when you’re on the bridge of pissing your pants. Everyone had laughed at that. Stan had only been half-kidding.

He was truly afraid that Henry would kill him, or hurt him so badly he wouldn’t be able to move and he would rot into the ground before anyone cared enough to look for him. Stan almost slapped himself for that. His friends would look for him. Saying otherwise felt like an insult to their character. 

_ Alone. _

Stan had been alone. Somehow this kept replaying in his head and his tears soon ran dry as he mulled the word over and over. The word felt wrong. It felt sickly and it made Stan feel like there was something desperately out of place in his world.

He opened his eyes and he met eyes with the doll. Only it wasn’t on the seat where Stan had left him. He was sitting on the floor, against the footboard of Stan’s bed. The doll really was fucking haunted, wasn’t it? Oh geez, his dad will really be pissed if he finds out. 

Stan wiped at his eyes and laughed a little to himself. Bringing a haunted doll home. God, maybe Stan’s going to star in the next horror film at the Aladdin. Stan had the initiative to get up now. Something to do. Stanley quite liked having things to do. He picked himself off the floor and quickly went and washed his face in the sink. His was blistering red where it was bleeding, although the bleeding had stopped by now. Stan’s face would be littered with little scabs for the better part of a week or two but he’ll live. Stan stopped washing his face as soon as he was able and didn’t give his reflection a second glance as he shut the bathroom door behind him.

Stan changed into his pajamas. He was freezing. Stan opened the third drawer of his dresser and pulled on a heavy knitted sweater. It was a little big for him, but it wore well in bed which is pretty much the only reason he had ever kept it in the first place. The sleeves were soft and didn’t irritate the cuts on his face when he pressed his hand against it to warm his cheek up. It didn’t really work all that much.

Stan, who admittedly, was still sniffling a little, finally walked to the doll and hoisted it up by the armpits. He walked it to the bed and laid it down. Embarrassed, he flicked his bedsheet over it to cover its naked body. Could a doll  _ be _ naked? Is it even a body? Stan’s own thoughts were confusing him. Stan got the clothes out of his backpack as quick as he good and he pulled the shorts onto the doll while it was still under the blanket - giving it some level of modesty. 

As Stan sits the doll up to put its arms through the shirt holes, Stan thinks he begins to lose his mind a little. He starts talking to it. 

“Bet you were cold all day, huh?” Stan pulls the shirt over its head. Its hair had dried in loose waves, not as curly as Stan’s - but waves enough. He fusses over the shirt for a bit, tugging it this way and that to try and get it to sit properly. He felt the doll looking at him throughout. It didn’t unsettle him as much as it should have, though. In fact, he found some weird sort of comfort in it. 

Tonight is a night for sleeping with the sky in his sights, Stan thinks. He says it aloud too, giving the doll an explanation for why he was leaning over it to grab his pillow from the head of his bed. He flipped the blanket so the buttons were facing the right direction and crawled into the bed. He decided the doll would be safest on the windowsill, so he spends a fairly lengthy amount of time trying to balance it on the sill. The doll may have been a little big for it, but somehow Stan managed to get it balanced enough. It never occurred to him to put the doll back on the chair, or on the ground, even.

“Your back is going to be pretty cold, up against the window like that. Sorry… but you’re a doll so I don’t think you’re susceptible to frostbite,” Stan said quietly, looking more into the sky as he lay himself down properly. His face still burned with snow. “Me, on the other hand…” Stan let himself trail off as he stared out into the sky. The snow had stopped and the air was peacefully still. It was a full moon tonight, Stan noticed. He wondered if the movie that Eddie and Bill had watched was a werewolf one… he laughed to himself at that. He could imagine them both looking out their windows now, just like Stan, and shitting their britches noticing the full moon. Especially Eddie. Stan doesn’t really understand why the kid went with Bill to the movies… Eddie  _ hates _ that spooky stuff… it scares him senseless. Stan figured Bill had offered to pay for his popcorn - usually that’s enough to persuade him.

The sky was dark, but it had that city-glow about it… never quite reaching _pitch_ _black_… always with the melancholic bluey haze about the sky that never really goes away. Stan thinks that blue-ish haze is going to follow him no matter where he moves to, in the future, of course.

“There are no stars tonight...,” Stan starts but a harsh clinking stalls the words in his throat. He spares a look at the doll. Its neck had contorted a bit and it was more hunched over, its neck - instead of facing into the room like Stan had faced him - was now facing the window. Stan swallowed thickly. It fell. Stan was supporting it with its head in the corner of the wall and the window and it gave out and the neck turned and it moved. That’s it. Stan didn’t have an explanation for why the doll’s eyes were now upwards… looking up to the stars. Stan continued his sentence, “Sometimes if a star is really bright you can see it. You have to  _ really _ look, though. Derry has a lot of light pollution, so my Dad says, so we don’t get to see the stars much. You do in the country… every year my Scouts group go on a camp trip down to the Maine Conservational Nature Park and it’s miles and miles away from anybody. The sky is ink black… so black you’d think you’d gone blind…. But then you look up,” Stan paused, remembering the feeling of looking up into oblivion… with the cosmos staring back, “and there are _ hundreds _ . More stars than you could ever count. It’s amazing.”

Stan took another look at the doll and thumped his head against the pillow, “I’m losing my mind…. I really am. Henry must’ve knocked something out of place when he slammed my head into the ground.” 

Stan felt something  _ twang _ inside of him. Like pulling on a taut piece of twine. It reverberated inside of him and it followed him to the doll. Stan really was starting to think he was losing his mind. 

“That keeps happening. All this weird stuff…” Stan sought through his brain, “the voice… that damned voice -  _ The Turtle _ . I don’t know why I know it’s a turtle - but it is! And it doesn’t make a lick of sense. It told me there were seven of us, but there’s not… there are five of us. Me, Bill, Eddie, Ben, and Beverly. Five,” Stan counted out for the doll, “And yet… it feels wrong. The Turtle said seven. So it  _ has _ to be seven. Then we went into the house where I found you, the turtle told me to go up the stairs and then I followed the magpies and… there you were,” Stan spoke softly, as though there had been some sort of melancholic shift, “You were dirty and broken and covered in maggots in some beat-up ol’ box in Neibolt House-” 

Stan was interrupted by the sound of a child crying from outside his window, presumably. Unmistakable but distant and drowned out. Like an echo from an empty stadium arena. It sunk in Stan’s stomach. 

“The voice... I don’t know exactly what it is. If it’s God or if it’s something bigger...but it lead me to you. I don’t know why the universe wanted me to take home some shattered raggedy-ann wannabe but… it did,” Stan said. 

He didn’t feel much like talking about it anymore. It was too confusing and too heavy of a thing for him to wrap his head around with a ringing ear and a splintering headache, “You’re just a doll… you’re not much help.” 

Just as Stan was about to roll over to sleep something outside his window caught his eye. Above that one dormer window was a star. Brighter than what Stan had ever seen from his bedroom window before. He let out a soft ‘ _ wow _ ’ and set himself up to look at it. He scooted to the windowsill and rested his chin on it… just staring at the brightest star that he had seen in a long time. You didn’t get them like this in Derry. Not with the lights. Against all odds… it was here. 

“My Mom used to tell me this rhyme to help me sleep,” He said, “I used to have a lot of trouble sleeping and my Mom told me to lie in bed and wait for the stars to come up - because the first star is special. The first star is magic,” Stan laced his voice with the same wonder that he felt when his Mom had told him that, “I would sit for  _ hours _ just waiting for the first star to come out. I used to cry and pace around the room and toss and turn until I near wore scorch marks on my mattress cover. It was relaxing… I would wait patiently for it. When it did come out… when I spotted the first star of the night, Mom told me a rhyme to say.” 

Stan racked his brain to remember it. It had been that long since he had even thought about waiting for the stars to come out and making wishes on them that he had nearly forgotten it. You don’t forget things like this though, things like this are taught to us for a reason.

“Starlight, star bright,

first star I see tonight,   
I wish I may,   
I wish I might,   
Have this wish I wish tonight.”

Stan felt a wave of peace wash over him. It reminded him so fondly of his youth… sitting up making wishes and telling his Mother _ all _ the toys and games that he had wished for. Sometimes his darling Mother would slip one of the toys under his pillow a few days later. Stan reckons he’s the first and only person to ever cry over a game of checkers.

“It’s a little dumb, isn’t it?” He sighs to himself, “I used to think the wishes came true. Believed it with no doubt. I guess that’s the great thing about being a kid… you’ll believe anything you’re told. You get cynical when you grow up… maybe that’s why the adults are all so miserable.”

Stan took a last look at the star and turned himself back over in bed. “Forget the adults -  _ I’m _ miserable. None of my friends are in my class… I get snow rubbed into my face until it bleeds just because I’m  _ Stanley,  _ I guess. And now… now I’ve got some sort of psychic powers like in Eddie’s  _ X-Men _ comics! And you’re a part of it. There’s something about  _ you _ that’s important,” Stan let out a heavy sigh of defeat as he closed his eyes for the night.

“I just wish I had a way of finding out what’s going on.” 

And with that, Stan let himself fall into a deep sleep. Unaware of the star, which had been burning a regular starlike colour… now burned a deep blue. Bluer than Stan’s baby blue walls… bluer than the blue-ish haze of the skyline… bluer than the doll’s  _ Freese’s Department Store _ tee. Bluer than anything blue that the little town of Derry had ever seen. More blue than the human brain could even comprehend. It was a cosmic colour. A colour only the deepest part of the ocean and the clearest part of the sky could ever even  _ begin _ to conceptualize. The doll began to glow. Not with light. The doll began to glow with  _ life. _

When Stan would wake up, not an hour later with a full bladder that needed relieving, he would stumble and trip over something on his bedroom floor and as he fumbles his hand down on the light switch, Stan would see what would soon become the answers to all his queries, lying face-down on his bedroom floor. 

  
Stan would see the doll, no longer really a doll. A lot more human. A lot more  _ alive _ . And Stan would scream... and near piss himself when the ‘doll’ screamed back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! Thank you all for supporting this fic, it's very near and dear to my heart.


	4. Chapter 3: Richie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An 11k chapter? On Christmas? To make up for my radio silence? You're welcome.

When Stan switched on his bedroom light to a boy lying on his floor, a whirlwind of thoughts ran through his head. Flying past his strain of consciousness so fast he couldn’t quite fasten down a single coherent thought.

He stood with his mouth agape, after letting out his initial scream which had been echoed by another one shortly after. The two noises of horror fought against each other for audial dominance but in the end, the stranger who was face-down on Stan’s carpet had won. The stranger scuttled back and pressed his back against Stan’s bed, chest heaving and eyes darting around the room. It seemed like he was on drugs, his eyes were hazed and unfocused and spinning around like the reflections off of a disco light, flickering back and forth. Stan couldn’t pin-point what his eyes could have been searching for if he tried. Stan’s eyes were not much like the stranger’s at all. They were heavy, plugged to the boy in front of him like the boy would pull a gun out at any moment. Stan may have suspected that he might if it weren’t for the fact that the boy was trembling like a chicken on its way to the block. 

The boy was definitely not well. Tall and thin - although it was difficult to concern  _ how _ tall he was with his current position of back flush against the side of Stan’s bed, legs curled up to his chest, twitching forward every now and again, prepared to kick anything that posed a threat and fingers digging into the carpet like a lifeline. White at the knuckles. White at the knuckles and pretty much white all over. A sickly, mottled type of white that looked almost deathly, similar to the people you see laid up in hospital beds or with the height of influenza bearing down on their shivering shoulders. And of course, the flickering eyes, dancing around the room in more of a panic than Stan has ever quite seen on someone’s face. It made him feel strange. Disoriented… like he had just woken up from an accidental nap on the couch, not quite sure what day or time it is, not quite knowing where you are for a moment or what happened, feeling vaguely sick and cotton-mouthed and heavy-headed. The passage of time wearing thick on the air in heavy globs, blurring the sky and dimming the sun from its tell-tale indication of the time of day. That’s how the boy looked, only instead of rising gently from a peaceful nap, he woke up with an accidental kick in the ribs.

Stan could feel the confusion and fear hanging heavily in the air. It was thick with it. It blotted the light and sullied the shadows and Stan’s arm fell from the light switch like it was ladened with cement. This action caused the Boy to visibly start.

“Get the fuck away from me! Get away! Leave me alone!” The Boy’s voice rattled with effort, and through the shouts, despite their volume and the genuine, flashing wash of fear that came with them, Stan could hear the mumbles of his Father downstairs. No doubt he was just woken up by the noise. The Boy’s eyes had caught Stan now, searching over his person wildly without pausing to take much in. His eyes were glassy as if he were about to cry, for some reason this made Stan awfully distressed.

“I’m not going to hurt you-” Stan said, taking a backward glance at the door before taking a timid step forward, like he would if he were approaching a bird he wanted to see up close, worried that it would get frightened and flutter off.

“Go away! Leave me alone! Leave me  _ alone!” _ The boy cried once again, scampering back farther, or trying to, at least - an awful  _ clinking _ sound rang out as the Boy backed harshly into the side of Stan’s bed - right into the wood of it. 

That noise… it was familiar. It sought out Stan’s ears and rattled inside of his head over and over again on repeat, over the choked little raspy sounds of the Boy on his floor, over the consistent hum of his ceiling light, over the whirring of the fan from his bathroom. It was louder than all of these and Stan, embarrassingly, had recognised it in an instant. Unmistakable. He had heard it in Neibolt and he had heard it not several hours earlier as the doll had turned to look at the sky. Which he had, Stan now recounts. The doll hadn’t fell or shifted naturally at all. The doll… Stan looked to the window sill - was gone. The doll was gone and the Boy on his floor with wiry black hair and a  _ Freese’s Department Store _ t-shirt (that Stan had only just noticed, for shame) had made a distinct sound that shadowed the doll.

The doll.

The doll was crying and heaving loud, frightened sobs on his bedroom floor. 

Stan didn’t have time to wrap his head around it much further than that - but truly, it would take days before Stan would wrap his head around it at all - because not a moment after the realisation had sunk in, the landing light flicked on and Stan could hear sleep-heavy steps coming up the stairs.  _ His mother. _

Oh Lord - his mother was going to come in and see Stanley, not only with a boy she has never met on the bedroom floor but with the boy crying and sobbing like Stanley had been seconds away from gutting him. 

“Hey, listen, you gotta be quiet-” Another garbled cry, “Hey!” Harsh shout-whispers, “You gotta be quiet, my mom is coming and she’ll lose it if she hears you screaming the house down.” Stan tried to quieten the boy and the screams had devolved into incoherent mumbling and hiccups, the boy seemingly too distraught to even remember how to use his vocal cords. It was still loud enough in the stillness of nighttime and still succeeded in sending Stan’s stomach to the ground. His mother’s footsteps only got closer and closer until Stan had no option but to surge forward and cover the Boy’s mouth with his hand. 

He had barely made contact when his mother’s tentative knock hit the hollow wood of his bedroom door and the boy scratched and struggled with him. He shook his head violently and pulled at Stan’s arms and kicked at him with his legs, leaving Stan no choice but to hike himself onto the boy’s thighs and use his legs to force the boy’s kicks flat to the carpet. The crying was desperate now. No longer fearful but something else, like he had been caught and was just waiting for a knife to his throat or a gun to his head. Hopelessness. Acceptance. 

“Stanley? Are you alright? We heard a commotion up here.” His mother’s voice was low and gentle. She had thought Stan had woken up to a nightmare, which although isn’t very frequent - isn’t outside the realm of possibility. She didn’t try to open the door. She was good like that, she gave her son space and Stan, especially at this particular moment, was grateful for.

The boy’s eyes blew open wide at the new voice and he struggled more under Stan, actually looking over his face now, with such franticness that his irises seemed to vibrate with the speed. Stan did a shushing motion with his free hand and replied, "Yes, Mom. Just a nightmare - sorry for waking you."

"Oh, darling, would you like me to make you some cocoa? It's been so long since you had your nightmares again, would you like me to come in?" 

No no. Definitely not. His mother, ever so kind. It was displaced here at this moment. Offerings of hot cocoa almost laughable as Stan sits on top of a  _ doll _ he had stolen from the Neibolt house, while it flinches and heaves perished breathes into his hand. A comical twinkle of normality in exploration in strange. "No thank you, mom. I'm just going to go back to sleep."

With a soft  _ okay, sweetheart  _ \- the soft footfalls back down the stairs and the click of the landing light ripping the sliver of orange away from under the door. The length of light was a familiar comfort, a hookline of familiarity and now Stan is alone with … this thing underneath him.

Previously ‘the Boy’, now that doesn't feel right. Not a boy at all, because under the warmth of Stan's palm was the morbidly familiar feel of smooth porcelain, cold - sucking the warmth from his hand almost unnaturally. No soft skin, but hard delicateness, sharp and fragile. 

Stan sucked a breath and tried to steady his thoughts, ultimately - he had to stay calm because this….thing… was on a tightrope between keeping quiet and screaming the house down again. He was panting heavily, Stan shifted, barely half an inch, and the Doll’s eyes squeezed shut in a heavy flinch. Stan reckons he has more of a reason to be freaked out. He woke up to a boy-doll hybrid on his fucking bedroom floor. Getting nervous won’t help, as much as Stan would love to freak out - because he really,  _ really  _ would, if his parents come in they’ll freak out at Stan for sneaking a friend upstairs, wondering where he came from and why they’ve never seen him before. He could hardly tell the  _ truth - _ God, he’d be carted off to Juniper Hill Asylum before he could even finish his sentence. _ Yeah, Mom; I broke into that dilapidated house on Neibolt and stole a doll - but you don’t understand, a voice told me to. I took him home and washed it of maggots and then when I woke up he was “human” and lying fast asleep on my bedroom floor.  _

Stan had to keep a level head, keep this doll-boy from shouting. Stan wouldn’t hurt him, Stan couldn’t hurt much of anything; he cried when he stood on a snail last month down in the Quarry. Stanley couldn’t do much harm, he wasn’t cut out for it. Even in self-defense, even if this doll-boy were to lash out - considering his trembling form and the rattle of his knobbly knees, Stan doubts that will be the case - Stan would sooner bolt than take a swing - like he had with the Bowers so many times, running with a heaving chest and burning legs while Bill would take a swing, or a kick, or a headbutt before getting his shit knocked out of him. It was instinct -  _ fight or flight. _ Stan flutters off in flight and leaves feathers in his wake.

Stay calm, diffuse the situation;  _ then _ try to figure out what is going on. 

“I can see you’re freaked out,” Stan’s voice was quiet...low but clear, “I am too. I’m equally as freaked out as you are. I’m not going to hurt you - and you’re not gonna hurt me. I woke up and you were suddenly on my floor, I don’t know who you are and I don’t know  _ why  _ you’re on my bedroom floor. I can see that you’re not… human. You were a doll - I found you and took you home and now you’re alive. I’m starting to think that I inhaled some type of gas from a busted pipe in that old house and now I’m just having hallucinations.” 

The doll watched him with wide eyes but they focused a little more - a little less crazed and a little less frantic.

“If I take my hand away, will you be quiet?” No response. Stan chanced it. The doll-boy kind of just... sat there, chest slowly starting to slow its heaves, breaths dragging from ragged to soft, eyes drying and mouth closing. His eyes were trained on Stan like he still didn’t trust him. Stan had an unyielding need to earn his trust. String yanking his chest. 

The silence was heavy, a little uncomfortable. Stan was still sitting somewhat on the doll-boy, the sharp, cold bite of his skin draining the heat from his legs. Skin… could he call it that? It wasn’t skin, not really. It was porcelain, or ceramic - something cold and dangerous as it was fragile and delicate. Stan, with as much speed as a comatose snail, lifted himself off of the thin legs and shuffled backwards. Relief when his rear fell to the soft familiarity of his carpet. He tucked his knees under his chin and wrapped his arms around his legs. 

Stan let the silence settle for a bit, settling in parallel to the doll-boy, who had slowly calmed down as the ticking of Stan’s watch metronomed through a handful of long minutes. Less caged animal; more lost child, cowering in the corner of a busy supermarket, waiting for a parent to find him and bring him home, alone for the first time in his life and anxiety-fueled terrors of being left there, abandoned. 

Stan broke the silence. A rock into a still pool. His breath broke a little as he spoke, “Do you have a name?” 

The Boy looked at him for a moment, surprised - but not afraid that he had spoken. The Boy stared back down to his hands, clutching at his knees in a position not all too dissimilar to Stanley. His brows twisted in thought. Gears turning in his head over and over like a dust-clotted machine. He didn’t look all too sure of his answer when he nodded his head, slowly; like he wasn’t quite sure whether it was correct or not, testing an answer and waiting to be told that he was wrong.

“What is it?” Stan asked. A part of him tugged towards the boy-doll, a strange type of curiosity. The same type of pull that had led him into the haunting room and up to the splintered box in the first place. 

A pregnant pause. Long enough to tread between the valley of  _ pause _ and  _ silence. _ Moments ticked by. Thirty echoed ticks under the glass of his watch. Bouncing off the roof and slinking heavily to the ground, piling up inside an hourglass.

“ _ Richie _ .” 

Stan had almost jolted when the Boy spoke because he had began to think maybe he couldn’t - despite the earlier screaming but to his surprise, the Boy -  _ Richie - _ seemed to be equally surprised. His mouth moved oddly around the words when he spoke, tasting them. His eyes blinked in surprise at himself when the sound reached his ears, raspy and sticky; like years of silence, but soft. His fingers dotted to his mouth, testing his lips. A soft  _ clink _ upon collision which made Richie visibly sink. 

“You can talk,” Stan said, immediately feeling foolish for saying it.

“I can  _ talk,” _ Richie sounded even more wrapped up in wonder than Stan, defying expectations of himself. Richie began to lift himself out of the curled position he had adapted. Spreading out a little more against the bed. His chest blew open with deep, more casual breaths, relief at last. Little by little his shoulders untensed and his eyes stopped skirting around the room, settling into the gentle present. Stan liked making the strange boy feel safe. 

The boy seemed in such amazement that he could speak, as if he had forgotten that he had screamed and yelled loud enough to wake his parents and the neighbour’s German Shepard, which was now barking into the night. His eyes were focused now, no longer hazed but clear. A clear and slightly red-rimmed brown. Maybe he  _ had _ forgotten, he seemed like a different state of being entirely now - squinting around Stan’s room with curiosity rather than for an exit point.

Now that the boy -  _ Richie,  _ he reminds himself - is a little more approachable, Stan reckons that he’s timely due his own freakout, “Who are you?” Stan’s voice wobbled a little.

The boy cocked his head in confusion, as if it was a ridiculous question, “Who am I?” 

“Why are you on my bedroom floor?” Stan asked, only to receive another empty look in response - the boy knew nothing. He knew absolutely nothing, “Well…  _ what  _ are you, then?” 

The boy stared at him, light draining from his eyes a little, “What am I?” He muttered to himself, chin falling to his chest - a soft  _ clink _ rang out and the boy trembled at that. With sudden panic, he brought his hands to his face and shot dead. Ball joints on the knuckles of his fingers, big ball joint at the wrist. This boy was a puppet, nimble and mobile, controlled by its own accord. A hurricane realisation pinned Richie to the side of the bed, a harsh clink as his spine connected with the frame, suddenly sat up straight. His jaw slack and he looked over his hands, then his arms, then his legs and ball joints of his knees and ankles, “I’m… alive?” Stan stared in fascination and mumbled out a rushed reply when Richie looked at him expectantly.

“Yuh-yeah… you’re alive. You were a doll - like a normal doll not…” Stan gestured at him, “that.” 

“A puppet,” Richie said, flexing his fingers curiously, getting used to being alive, Stan assumes.

“Sorry?” 

“You keep saying doll - you always say ‘doll’. I was a puppet,” Richie suddenly looked over his shoulder - staring blankly at Stan’s wall, “He hated it when people called them dolls,” and just as soon as he had turned, he had turned back, tapping his fingers to his knee in a grating high-pitched sound. Like cups bumbling together in a running sink. 

A word stuck out in that -  _ he - _ the owner of the puppets, perhaps - or maybe… maybe it was the voice. The voice that had lead him to Richie, dirty and disgusting, yet so important Stan stuffed him into his coat and zipped him up anyway. Stan subconsciously flexed his hand like Richie had been doing, “Who?” Richie’s blank stare, another cock of the head, “Who hated them being called dolls?” Richie looked at him in confusion, confusion more so at himself than at Stan.

“I don’t know,” He said, a little far away.

“Oh, okay,” Stan didn’t want to push him any, not capable to process any more of what was happening.

“No - I  _ did _ know. I don’t anymore. I’ve forgotten… but… it’s not something I should have forgotten,” Richie said, looking a little small, “I forgot…everything. I don’t remember anything.” His lips tightened and his face began to sweat. Knuckles white in the carpet. Teetering on the edge again.

“Forgot what?” Stan asked gently, like talking to a scared stray animal, scared it was going to set Richie off again.

“The last thing I remember is the light. It opened up and it hurt my eyes - maybe I was blinded because I couldn’t see anything. Someone took me out, took me away from somewhere. I-” He stumbled over his words a bit as memories came trickling back in, “The voice.  _ Find Stanley. Find Stanley. Find Stanley.”  _ Richie looked pained to say it, like a headache was blistering through him. He cradled his head in his hands, “Fuck… I don’t know anything. I don’t remember anything. That’s all I remember - that stupid voice, it was so loud… it drowned everything out - like a tsunami just engulfing everything flat as it goes past.” 

Stan, now listening intently, found himself leaning forward, his breath barely a whisper as though this was a secret in a crowded room, “ _ You heard it too?”  _ A beat of silence, “I heard it. It told me where to find you, it made me find you. I felt this…” Stan struggled for a word.

“Click?” Richie supplied, “Like something clicking into place?” 

Stan nodded dumbly. This was all becoming too much.    
  
Richie looked at him a little sheepishly, “I felt warm when you picked me up - safe. I had been just… floating before you came. I could see and I could think, but that was it. When you opened the box and picked me up, I felt warm for the first time in… forever, I think. I hadn’t felt that before. Suddenly I could hear and smell and feel and  _ move. _ I could  _ move. _ Not a lot - mind, but enough. God, my joints are stiff as fuck. I feel like a goddamn geriatric.” 

Stan sat gobsmacked, “Do you think we were meant to be together?” Before he even got a chance to rephrase his sentence, Richie let out a soft laugh, a little broken and a little clumsy, as if he was caught off guard by it himself.

“First you take me home, then you strip me down to my bare essentials, waterboard me a little, then take me  _ stargazing? _ God, this is one hell of a first date, casanova,” He punctuated with a wink.

Stan felt his cheeks flush a little. He had stripped Richie down, hadn’t he? The thought embarrassed him now, knowing Richie had been conscious throughout all of that, through  _ everything _ . He rested a hand soft against his cheek. Still raw and shiny from the undermost layers of skin being exposed; but it started scabbing fairly well, running rough under his touch. Richie’s face fell into a more gentle one, pity - maybe, empathy - perhaps. It could have been a lot of things.

Stan steered the conversation elsewhere, somewhere more comfortable and somewhat more useful, although not all that much actually came of it, “What now?” Richie hummed for him to continue, his chin resting on his knees. He kept squinting, Stan asks if the light was too bright; he said it wasn't so Stan continued, “Do I bring you back to the house?” Stan’s gut fell as he said it, and if Richie’s face was anything to go by - his did too.

He shook his head, before scrubbing his face with a horrid sound of a fork on a dinner plate and huffed out a humourless laugh, “Geez, I’ve only just been born and you’re already trying to kick me out, thanks, Stan.” 

“I’m not trying to do anything! I just don’t know what to do - it’s not like I’ve been in this situation before,” Stan said a little defensively. 

“Oh yeah, I wake up on pretty-boys’ bedroom floors after shapeshifting from a fucking puppet  _ all the time,”  _ Richie said. Stan rolled his eyes at the phrasing and Richie gave him a crooked smile.

“How do you know my name? I never told you it,” Stan asked, stifling a yawn. It was - Stan checked his watch - almost one in the morning at this point.

“You said it -” A yawn, as contagious as ever, “You said it before you went to sleep. After some jackass whitewashed you for  _ ‘just being Stanley, I guess.’ _ ” 

Stan cast his eyes off of the boy’s face and smoothed out the creases of his pajamas, “You heard all of that?” 

“Every bit, scout-boy.”

Stan groaned and worked it all over in his head, or tried to at least. There were a couple of interesting things that he had discovered over the course of this exceptionally strange conversation.

  1. Richie was a semi-alive puppet, now very much alive, for some reason.
  2. Richie had, in fact, felt the same strange magnetic pull towards Stan that Stan had felt towards him. 
  3. In tandem, Richie also heard the Voice. The Turtle. It told him to find Stanley, and find Stanley he did… now what? A question for another time. 
  4. Richie had nowhere to go, no clue who he is, what he is or _why_ he is. 

Stan wanted to drown  _ himself _ in pesticide. What was he to do? A young boy of sixteen with wounded scabs on his face and a wiry taut disposition who jumped at car horns and scary movies and who cried over stepping on bugs. Why did it have to be  _ him? _

Stan spared a glance at Richie, who was looking back at him, lip pulled nervously between his teeth, looking a little lost and a little frightened - a nonverbal beg for Stan to not leave him alone. 

_ Alone. _

The word hung heavy in Stan’s head for the second time that night. A yank of a thread. Stan’s chest jumped and Richie’s did too - he could feel it. So tangible that Richie had swiped the air between him to catch the string connecting them, pulling and yanking them any which way it pleased. 

Alone was wrong. Alone was like acid on his tongue, sour and putrid, begging to be spat out onto the pavement. Stan wasn’t alone now. Stan could feel it in his chest, that familiar feeling of becoming  _ right _ … like he had slipped a missing piece of himself into his insides and he was whole for the first time in his life. With an overwhelmed breath and a dazed-looking smile, Richie gave Stan a thumbs up - an overly enthusiastic thumbs up which he had jabbed himself square in the eye with.

Without a second thought, Stan padded down to the airing cupboard and pulled out his sleeping bag - reserved for those nights with the Scouts, but it wouldn’t go amiss on his bedroom floor for the night, and a pair of feathery pillows. He returned with his arms full and Richie’s face full into a smile -  _ Are we having a slumber party?  _ In the morning, he would ring Beverly. Beverly - he decided - would know what to do. Level-headed and calm, empathetic but honest, she was the best person he could think of who could help him. He thought of someone else, too. Someone kind and dependable, but he couldn’t quite put a name to it…  _ not yet.  _

Stan shouldn’t have accepted it so willingly, he shouldn’t have accepted without  _ much _ argument that a boy turned from a puppet was nestled up in his sleeping bag on his bedroom floor. It was ridiculous, it was beyond what he could have ever anticipated. But somehow, he felt at peace. A settlement washed over him, a sense of belonging… something big on the horizon. Like a plan in action, just one more thing to go. _ One more person _ , Stan thinks. 

After a heavy silence, neither moving or speaking for such a time that Stan had assumed that Richie had fallen asleep did he pipe up, voice noticeably dry and cracked, more noticeable now that Stan had gone an hour or so without hearing it, “Do you feel it too?” Stan didn’t have to ask what he meant. 

“Yes,” Stan said, rolling over to face the strange boy, “Yes, I do.” 

Richie had hummed at that and tapped along his chest with his fingers. A soft clinking noise, softened by the  _ Freese’s _ t-shirt. The sound, although cutting in the nighttime air, comforted Stan somewhat - a sound no one else other than Richie could replicate, as Richie danced tunes into his chest, Stan fell into the guise of sleep with it. 

Richie, on the other hand, didn’t sleep.

Not that he couldn’t - he assumes - he’s tired as all hell, but he found himself too preoccupied with staring at the strange boy who flushed life into him with the warmth of his arms alone. This boy potentially saved his life from the cold, empty place that he had been. He didn’t remember much of that place - just that it had been there, and remembering it made his stomach churn. 

He felt safe here. Richie felt more safe with this stranger than he possibly could have with anyone else on the face of the planet - Richie, for reasons unknown - understands that this is kind of a big fuckin’ deal. The unknown, looming and present and swims beneath the surface, the water bowing as it’s just about to break through to the surface, but it doesn’t. It lurks beneath him with intent. 

_ With orange glowing eyes. _

Richie startled upright. 

A memory. 

Vividly a memory. Orange glowing eyes warping and bubbling through a rushing flow of water. An unnatural and powerful current so violent and so strong that the bubbles of air it created had almost completely enveloped him in a sea of white; except two piercing threats of orange. An overwhelming choke of dread… of nothing short of evil.

If Richie were on his own, he may have cried. But Stanley’s steady breaths calmed him. A heavy breather and a light snorer - Richie felt sleep swell through him in tandem with Stan’s deep breaths, as though Stan was guiding him into sleep. It wasn’t Richie’s own feeling of calm, it didn’t feel quite like him. He couldn’t quite explain it. The flat, comfortingly warm feeling of sleep that slowly began to coat his senses like a soft knitted blanket was not his own. Stan shifted in his sleep and he could feel the blanket inside him shift, too. 

_ Remember, Richie. You must remember. Let him help you remember.  _

The Turtle was so demanding of attention, voice low and soft but somehow powerful and impactful all the same - even Stanley, who had felt the rumblings of the voice in his chest, had blinked his eyes open in a moment of confusion before falling straight back asleep - light snores filling the room immediately. Richie was soon soothed into a somewhat good sleep. He’ll remember - he knows he will, he just has to figure out what is it he had forgotten

  
  
  
  


In the morning Stan woke up to his room in darkness. The only light a small green glow from his digital alarm clock. Stan woke up easily the best of times, having an almost eerily accurate body clock that woke him up at six on the dot every morning, regardless of how much or how little sleep he had gotten. 

Richie, of course, was still there. Snoring lightly into the pillow. Stan watched him for a little, entranced. The green glow perfectly shadowed the crevices of the harsh ball joint of his wrist. The actual biology of the boy in front of him was interesting, his skin clearly a type of porcelain and his joints made of some form of ball joints - wood or plastic, perhaps, but his eyes were bright and full of life, his smile easy on his face. And now, as the peculiar boy lay snoozing on Stan’s bedroom floor, his face was lax and Stan felt a sort of privilege of being able to witness the show of vulnerability. 

Stan stepped ever so carefully over the boy when he got out of his bed, careful not to accidentally kick him for the second time that night. He faltered slightly at the threshold of the door - pulled open and exposed. Richie would be fine on his own, Richie wasn’t going to hurt him and he most certainly didn’t need to keep an eye on him. With that thought in mind, he quietly shut the door behind him and made his way downstairs and into the hall, walking through the dark house with the ease of a lifetime of dark winter mornings.

The phone was in the hallway, tucked in nicely under the stairs with a little table and notebook beside it and a little holder of three plain black ink pens. A heavy enough device with buttons worn from years of use - with a long enough cord for Stan to lift off of the table and drag around to the door just on his left - the family room. 

With the door shut and Stan’s back pressed up against it as he sat his rear down on the cold oak floor, he pressed in Beverly’s number - her father worked early, leaving the house more or less in the middle of the night, so he wasn’t worried about any disruption he may have caused. It wasn’t until the receiver was mumbling sleepy words into his ear had he realised he hadn’t even thought of what to say to her. 

  
The need to phone her was so instinctual and so reliant on the instant support he had always received from her that he hadn’t even paused to consider this may be a difficult thing to explain without seeming like he’d well and truly lost it. There was another sleepy ‘ _ hello?’ _ and he snapped himself out of his head.

“Good morning, Beverly,” He tried not to sound as anxious as he was, sound casual, even - but Beverly knew Stan wouldn’t be ringing her at six in the morning if it weren’t somewhat important.

“Good morning yourself, Stan -” a long yawn, “Not that I dislike hearing your voice, but you better have a good reason for me having to hear it before sunrise,” She didn’t sound particularly annoyed in any which way, and Stan hadn’t expected her to be.

He twisted the coiled cord around his finger, “It’s… uh-” It’s a lot of things. It’s everything; both inside him and out; from the distant quarters of the untouched universe, to the smallest and tiniest atoms in his body; it’s just a puppet-boy with squinty eyes and a laughable nervous disposition who is sound asleep on his bedroom floor. That might just be too much to comprehend this early in the morning, “It’s a really long story. Can you drop by before school?”

“You didn’t hear? School’s cancelled today, maybe tomorrow too. There was a gas leak, I think. I don’t know the details but it was announced on Derry Radio yesterday; don’t you listen to it? Eddie reckons that Hockstetter cut the gas line and was gonna set the place up in flames with all the kids in it.”

  
A breath of relief - this makes things a  _ lot _ easier, at least for the time being, “Can you come around this morning, then?” 

“Afternoon?” She begged.

“Morning,” Stan said fondly, “Sorry, it really is important.” 

Another yawn, “Are you okay, at least? Don’t be worrying a girl this early.” 

“Yes, I’m alright. It’s just - uh - I’ve found myself in a bit of a ...strange situation and I could do with some advice. I really can’t say much more about it because you’ll think I’m losing my mind, just…” He paused, “Trust me. My parents will be away at nine, come by anytime after then,” He paused and Beverly hummed in response, “Sorry for waking you, Bev.” 

“Don’t be silly - you can always call me, Stan. Any of us, anytime. You know that, right?” Stan said he did, and she continued, “You’ve been a little strange the last couple of days, we’ve been worried. If you ever need anything, even if you just want to hang out in the quiet-” her voice dropped to a more soothing tone, “You can  _ always _ ask me. I care about you and I hope you know that.” Stan did. Stan could feel it in his bones like a shower of silk with every heartfelt glance, every unspoken conversation, every fleeting brush of contact - fireworks of silk and detonation of belonging. 

“Yes, I know. I love you too,” He said. Beverly said it back and the phone made a heavy noise as he hung up the receiver. Beverly would help. Wonderful Beverly - she would help every person on the planet if she could. 

Stan dragged himself onto his feet and put the phone back where it belongs. He went to the kitchen and got himself his morning glass of juice. Usually orange - although sometimes his Mother decided to mix it up with apple or even a mixed fruit juice. Stan didn’t care for the random changes in his morning routine much; but he didn’t particularly  _ dislike _ apple juice persay, so he got a glass of it and trotted back up the stairs. 

His parents wouldn’t be long getting up and making breakfast and Stan realised he would have to explain to Richie that he would have to stay locked in his room like some type of dirty stray dog Stan had brought home, knowing all too well his father is allergic.

Stan opened his bedroom door - the coldness from the juice sent condensation dripping down his fingers. Richie was still asleep. Stan stepped back over him and set his drink on his bedside locker and carefully made his bed. It took two minutes. Corners so sharp they could cut you - the way Stan liked it. Needed it.

Stan drank his juice and ever-so-carefully watched the sky from the end of his bed. He had slept upside-down last night, he realised. His head at the footboard of his bed. He liked watching the stars, he should sleep like that more often. 

A soft  _ clink  _ pulled his eyes away from the window and down to the boy on the floor, who was now sitting up, squinting around the room and looking majorly disgruntled, “What time is it?” He asked, rubbing his eye - a horrible sound of nails on a chalkboard. Stan winced.

“Just after six.” 

Richie stretched, a series of strange popping-sounds coming from his back, “What - in the morning?” 

“As if you would sleep in until six in the evening,” Stan said and when Richie simply shrugged he stared at him in mild disbelief, “That’s - your entire day is wasted.”

“Not wasted if you enjoy it,” Richie said getting upright with a bit of creaking and a series of his familiar noises, “Why are you up so early… let me guess, you’re one of those weirdos who wakes up at the ass-crack of dawn to watch birds and eat oatmeal or something.” 

Stan narrowed his eyes, although he doesn’t think Richie saw it, “I like watching birds - and yes, I do wake up early. I don’t like being rushed when I’m getting ready,” Richie simply hummed and stared at the glass in Stan’s hands through his squinted eyes. He stared for long enough that Stan gestured with the glass, “Do you want some? Wait - do you -  _ can _ you drink? Are you hungry?” Richie just stared at him blankly and shrugged.

“I dunno,” He said, non-committedly, “Let’s find out,” He reached for the glass which only had a mouthful left in it anyway, Stan met him halfway and Richie took it all in his mouth. He sat for a moment, swishing the liquid in his mouth before swallowing… or at least… making the  _ noise _ of swallowing because a moment later he spat all of the liquid back into the cup, which made Stan reel backwards in horror.

“That’s disgusting,” Stan said, staring at the apple juice which now had little bubbles from the air Richie had swished into it from the inside of his mouth.

“Can’t swallow - dont think I have a food-tube or whatever the fuck. Can’t taste it either,” Richie looked a little disappointed at that but continued on regardless, “Man… this sucks. I turn into a person and I can’t even taste food. What’s the point, really? Oh, Turtle-overlord, please take my soul back - this is a wretched existence.” 

Stan didn’t like that - fearful that the Turtle would, in fact, do exactly that, “Don’t say that.” 

Richie looked taken aback for a moment before his face grafted into a wicked smile, “Aww… would you miss me, Stanley? If the big, bad Turtle-God came a shoved my ass back into a puppet, would you miss this handsome face?” 

“I’ve known you less than eight hours.” 

“And yet you can’t live without me, ain’t that right?” Stan wants to say no. He can’t. The settlement in his bones wouldn’t allow it so he just huffed and began to scoop up Richie’s sleeping arrangements, which caused the other boy to let out an indignant shout, “Hey! That’s my bed you’re rolling up! I need that to sleep on, Einstein.”

“You’re not staying here, you  _ can’t  _ stay here,” Stan said. He flattened out the bag and zipped it up, smoothing as many of the creases out of it as he could.

Richie’s heart cracked audibly, a stark and clean sound which stung in his chest. The string pulled at it roughly with the words and the pain reverberated through him as a string pulled when taut. It felt wrong to hear it. 

A lie - a full-frontal lie, acid and burning in his stomach even from listening to it. Maybe it was all his imagination, maybe he had grappled to closely at hope. The hope of this Stanley boy being the key to… something. He was still trying to work out what that something was, but it felt important so he didn’t quite let it slip his mind. 

He watched as this strange boy patted down the sleeping bag over and over again until  _ finally _ rolling it tightly. Richie could hardly make out his features - everything was dreadfully blurry - but he suspected his brow was furrowed in the effort of rolling it so tight. 

  
  
  
  


Beverly had arrived mere moments after Stanley’s mom’s car  _ finally _ pulled out of the driveway. Stan had been sitting at his desk, reading over the same paragraph of his book for the past hour, waiting to hear the familiar sound of gravel crunching under tires. When it happened and he looked out of his window to see his mother’s car reversing out and driving off to work, he told Richie to follow him downstairs. 

Beverly had walked through his front door before he had even finished coming down the stairs, clearly stood outside waiting for his mother to leave. He had showered and dressed into a pair of jeans and a red sweater, far too cold for his usual shorts and polo shirts. She held a greeting on her lips as she shrugged off her denim jacket that she had boasted about snagging from the thrift shop for two dollars, arm half-in half-out of it when her gaze met the boy who had almost collided into Stan when he had come to a sharp halt.

Her face was pulled in confusion as she gave a half-wave to Richie, who mirrored her actions. There was a pregnant pause and Stan  _ really _ didn’t want to be the one to break it. Beverly’s confusion was warranted - none of them had any other friends, an ongoing joke they all had, so for Beverly to walk in to seeing someone else in Stan’s home at such a time in the morning was sure to take her by surprise.

“Who’s the Pippi Longstockings?” Richie leaned over to whisper into Stan’s ear - but it wasn’t much of a whisper and Beverly flipped him the bird, visibly relaxing.

  
“Who’s this you’re babysitting, Stan?” She asked, a soft-half smile on her face. She was eyeing the boy up and down, picking him apart. Richie moved a little out of her watchful gaze and a little more into Stan’s personal space. 

“A stray followed me home,” He said. Richie snorted from behind him. “This is actually what I needed to talk to you about. Come up to my room, we can talk there.” His parents wouldn’t likely come home but he didn’t want to chance it, at least if they were in his bedroom he could cover up Richie easily - locking him in the ensuite perhaps. 

Beverly nodded and slipped off her boots, setting them neatly on the shoe rack. They went back up the stairs and Richie was taking curious glances at the two from behind him and smirking. It was getting on his nerves. Stan let Beverly into his room and shut the door behind him. Richie had sat on the reading chair and was absentmindedly playing with his bare feet - making soft clinking noises ring out into the room. Beverly had sat on his desk chair, only a couple of feet away from Richie. 

Thankfully, she didn’t seem to notice the annoying tapping noise and her full attention was drawn to Stan. 

Stan steeled a breath and rubbed his eyes, not quite sure where to start, “I’m going to tell you about everything - including who  _ that _ is-” He suddenly realised he hadn’t even introduced them, “oh, shoot, Beverly, this is Richie - Richie, this is Beverly.”

Richie squinted, a little less than usual, “The closer you get the more you actually do look like Pippi Longstockings.” 

“The closer  _ you _ get the more you look like you need a bath,” All in good humour. 

Stan looked over him. He looked a lot cleaner than he would have if Stan hadn’t bathed him. Although, there was a type of long-lived dirtiness about him, hair limp and knotted. Stan realised that Richie hadn’t showered yet today and although Stan can take a fairly educated guess that Richie doesn’t have sweat glands - it still made him feel a little gross.

The conversation was getting sidetracked as Richie and Beverly quipped back and forth as Stan turned the thoughts over in his head.

  
“Okay - please just let me explain. You’re going to think that I’m crazy, and honestly, if the roles had been reversed I’d be thinking it too. I know how this is going to sound, please just listen.”   
  


She nods and the dance of the encouraging quirk of her lip and the softening of her eyes said,  _ Of course, Stan - I’m listening. _

“Remember when we went into Neibolt the other day? We split up - you and Ben then me, Eddie and Bill. When we broke off into the kitchen, I heard this voice. It wasn’t my own but it came from inside my head, not that it belonged there - it exists outside of anything we can perceive - somewhere on a different plane of existence-”

“The Turtle,” Richie said. Beverly shot him a confused, bordering concerned look and back to Stan who nodded in confirmation.

“Yeah, The Turtle. It spoke to me - told me I had to follow it. It pulled me, like I was being drawn by a magnet, up the stairs and-”  _ Plunged into the Quarry. _ “And… it led me to a room and I knew I had to go into it… like a gut-feeling but stronger,” He tried to find his words, “Like when you get the sensation of being watched - and you  _ know _ that someone’s looking at you - without a doubt - it was like that. So I opened the door and it was… ghastly.

It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Dozens and dozens of puppets, fancy-looking ones like the Collector Edition dolls that sit in the window of  _ Malcolm’s,  _ they were so lifelike and clean - like they’d never gotten dirty despite the inch of dust on the floor and the spiders scuttling up the walls into the skirting boards. Most were small - like the size of a doll you’d give a kid, but some were bigger - like the size  _ of _ a kid - scale replica. There were all facing me and I walked down the parting - the aisle - towards a box. Maybe about two feet long. A busted and battered-looking thing. 

I  _ had _ to open it, I couldn’t have walked away if I wanted to - which I did. I really did. Something about the room was so sickly, I grew more lightheaded the longer I was there, Bev. Something isn’t right in there - like there were ghosts in the corner of the room watching me, waiting to come and get me. I opened the box and there was this puppet - but it wasn’t clean and manicured like the rest - it was disgusting.” Stan lowered himself to sit on the edge of his bed.

“Geez, well you’re no James Dean either,” Richie said.

“I picked it up and… I’m not sure what happened - but something clicked into place - like a missing piece of a puzzle I didn’t even know I was trying to solve. It was overwhelming. So I took it home-”   
  
“You stole it?” Beverly looked near speechless, “You stole… a maggot-infested doll from  _ Neibolt House?”  _

“Yeah - that’s pretty fucked up, Stanley,” Richie said. He made a rolling gesture with his hand, “But please continue-” He gestured to Beverly, “It’s getting to the good part.”

“Please stop talking,” Sending Richie a pointed look, “Yeah, I took it. Stole it, technically - if you want to put it like that. Anyway, that’s beside the point. I kept it in my room for a couple of days. I left for school yesterday and I had it sitting on that chair-” Richie wriggled in it a little, “And when I came back home it was on the floor.”

“Your mom could have moved it?” Beverly suggested. 

“No, she doesn’t come into my room if I’m not home. Hasn’t in a long time. It was a little unsettling if I’m honest. I’d turn my head and it would be facing a different direction. But… it felt comforting, too. I can’t really explain it - I wasn’t scared or anything, it’s like I knew it was something … else.” 

“Awk mistah Stanley - gawsh you’re making me blush.” A strange imitation of some sort of Southern Belle - although it sounded more like Richie than anything else. Stan paused, letting Beverly work over the riptides of information she had just been given. She threaded her fingers together and rotated one of her rings around her finger, little bits of green peeking out from under it from the fake silver.

As she worked through it, Richie was staring at her from the corner of his eye. Forced relaxation covering up the bubbles of anxiety through him. Richie could tell that this Beverly girl and Stan were close - friends, best friends even - maybe something more that there isn’t quite a word for yet. A very real albeit unspoken threat of abandonment was taunting thickly at his shadow. 

He knew she was important, not only to Stan - but to him. A strange sense of unprecedented familiarity.

Stan wasn’t fairing much better - watching Beverly like a hawk - eyeing her mannerisms and looking for any tell that she was going to cart him off to the hospital with a muzzle - and they hadn’t even gotten to the meat of the issue yet.

After an agonizing minute or so she relaxed a little into the chair, “Okay - there’s more, isn’t there?” 

Stan nodded, “You probably notice there isn’t a puppet in my room currently.” She nodded, not needing to check the room again - Beverly could read a room in a second, every accent and every spec of dust memorized in her head for as long as she needed it. “Well…” He gestured to Richie, who cupped his hands under his chin and smiled cheesily at her, “Meet Richie - the puppet.” 

A pin could have sunk through the silence in the air. Beverly’s confusion, looking between the two. 

A laugh erupted from Beverly, a little uncomfortably, “Am I missing something? Sorry, I don’t really get the joke - is this another one of your weird pranks?” 

Stan’s face sunk into his hands as he rubbed his eyes, “I told you that you wouldn’t believe me,” He wasn’t blaming her - he wouldn’t have believed him either. 

“No - it’s just-” She rushed, “I mean - you’re telling me that you stole a puppet from Neibolt House and it just….what, turned into…” She looked at Richie, who winked at her and replied.

“Into a strapping young lad?” A response to Richie’s poor attempt at… flirting? banter? died on Stan’s tongue when a sudden burst of commotion outside broke through the somewhat uncomfortable conversation. 

Outside, in the cold morning air, Bill, Eddie and Ben came soaring down the street - breath smoking into the air and a conversation light with laughter and as clear as crystal in the still morning. Silver’s body glinted like cut glass in the harsh sun, a beacon as clear as a lighthouse on a stormy sea - leading all the group into their positions behind Bill in the ride into battle, if it ever came to that.

For the moment, Bill cutting through the streets, rear lifted off of the seat as his legs pumped down on the pedals was the last thing Stanley wanted to see. Later - of course, an hour from now, even - but  _ now -  _ well, if that isn’t just the worst timing. Sure enough, Bill cut into the driveway, the sound of gravel audible from even behind the glass of Stan’s bedroom window, Ben and Eddie following shortly thereafter. 

Beverly didn’t need to look to know that the others had arrived, “Oh, Stan - I’m sorry. I told Bill this morning that I was coming over to talk to you - he was really worried but I didn’t  _ invite _ him - and I certainly didn’t tell him to bring everyone else, too.”    


Stan watched as the figures fell out of his sight, and barely a moment later, the chatter suddenly flooded his house as the front door opened and they spilled in - followed by a mumbled curse and a belated knock on the door.

  
“Bill was up before noon? That’s a first,” Stan said. He wasn’t sure how to approach this. Telling Beverly was one thing - she was the most honest out of all of them - and the ablest to pick up on honesty. But as for the others, it would take more convincing and he’d honestly not thought this far ahead.

A thunderous beating of steps running up the stairs, followed by a soft,  _ ‘Eddie, you need to take off your shoes,’ _ and the footsteps thundered back down after a loud groan. 

“Why do I feel like I’m about to get turned into a display feature in a china cabinet?” Richie asked, looking to Stan for reassurance. Stan couldn’t give him any so he just pretended he didn’t hear as Eddie - the only one of them who ran up the stairs with socks filled with cement - thundered back up. As the elephant feet settled at his bedroom door - a soft knock.

“Stan? Can we come in?” Eddie said almost quietly as if he hadn’t just rattled the roof coming up the stairs. 

“No,” He said, only half-kidding. 

Eddie opened the door but didn’t step within the threshold just yet, counting the extra figure in the room, “What’s going on?” 

Ben and Bill followed behind him moments later and gently pressed him into the room enough so that Bill was able to close the door - Stan didn’t like his door being open, they knew him well enough. Bill saw Richie - a friendly smile immediately sweeping his face, “Hi, I huh-haven’t seen you buh-buh-buh-before,” He moved to shake his hand but something made Eddie stop him. Eddie sensed something was amiss.

“Making friends, Stanley?” Eddie asked, eyeing up the boy curiously - no... apprehensively. Richie was picking at his shorts, pulling the threads out and leaving them frayed but it didn’t look like he even noticed.

“Not willingly, no.” Despite his words, Stan, since the others had come upstairs, had instinctively moved towards the foot of the bed, closer to Richie. The nerves were radiating off of Richie like a putrid stench and it was making Stan, himself, feel nervous. 

“Hey - what’s that meant to mean?” Richie asked.

“Well I didn’t exactly have a choice, did I?” 

Richie gave a (fake) sickeningly sweet smile, “But if you did - you’d still choose lil ol’ me, right?”   
  
“I’m donating you to J _ ohnson’s Toy Palace.” _

_ Johnson’s Toy Palace. _

_ Johnson’s Toy Palace. _

The words dizzied around in Richie’s head. He’d heard that before. The words melted into his head like butter and stayed there. Achingly familiar - at the tip of his tongue but just not quite teetering off of it. Conversation buzzed around him. It was hollow like he was listening from the floor below. He frayed the hem of his shorts more.  _ Johnson’s Toy Palace. _

The name felt happy, it lightened him - a nostalgic name. A naive and innocent type of joy that Richie felt almost shocked at feeling; long too old to be feeling such a breath of childhood amazement. Something stood out, something small - but important all the same. A quick flash of colour so brief that Richie may as well have not seen it at all - but he did. A deep, regal red, with gorgeous gold-speckled lettering - magical beyond what he had ever seen before - the sight of it shredded excitement through him like a child when Christmas comes early. 

The feeling, along with the flash of colour - left him as soon as it swept him up. He tried to conjure the colour up again - get longer visuals on it - try to  _ remember.  _ He was getting closer. Remembering what he hadn’t known he had forgotten. Not close enough. 

The colour faded fully from his memory, only the shadows of how they made his heart rate increase remaining. The phrase  _ water under the bridge _ came to mind - it made him feel unwell, and he brought his attention back to the conversation, hardly realising that he had zoned out much at all. The hem of his shorts looked like they’d been gnawed on by a werewolf. Stan’s voice brought him back fully to attention - a homing beacon, clutching Richie under the armpits and throwing him back into his surroundings. 

“-remember when we went to Neitbolt?” 

The small one screwed up his nose. Richie found it a little strange, the girl seemed nice enough, the fat one didn’t seem like he quite knew when it was okay for him to speak - poor guy. Then there was this tall boy in the middle, green plaid shirt and despite the fact that the boy could hardly speak right - he had this authoritative air about him, a rock - stable and reliable, there was something else there, too - Richie could see it in his eyes - a familiar look. Something dark, hidden away. A look one could only recognise if they had seen it before -  _ had Richie seen it before? _

Along with all these teenagers - Richie reckons that they’re more or less the same age as he is, which he somehow knows is sixteen - but this small one; the kid can’t be even fourteen yet. Barely scraping five-foot-three, with a soft face and pink cheeks and narrow little shoulders. His voice was deceiving, soft, maybe - but demanding attention, loud and bold when he spoke, “Neibolt? What - was he hiding underneath the floorboards and followed you home? Is he some creepy hobo or something?” 

Huh. 

The kid’s a dick.

“Hey, fuck you.” 

The kid turned to him, brow taut, “It was a joke, dipshit.” 

Richie saw the warning look Stan shot him, and Beverly’s rolling eyes - oh, this kid was feisty. 

“What are you - twelve? You shouldn’t be swearing like that - you kiss your mother with that mouth?” 

The kid took a couple of steps towards him - which more or less had him staring Richie down. Richie suddenly became very aware of the ugly joints of his puppet-hands, strange and unnatural in comparison. Beverly let out a low  _ ‘Eddie… don’t’ _ \- but Eddie ignored her, “I’m in the middle of a growth spurt.”

“How old  _ are  _ you?” 

“Sixteen - same as everyone else here - older than Bill, even,” He said, as though this was meant to suddenly make him appear bigger and stronger. As if being older than Bill - who Richie guesses is the one with the broken mouth - was suddenly going to barrell him through puberty. But sixteen? Richie could barely believe it. “Sixteen? Are you just hitting puberty? Cute, cute, cute,  _ cute!” _ And in a lapse of judgement, Richie reached out to pinch the fat of Eddie’s cheeks - just as he realised what he was doing - showing his ball-jointed knuckles for Eddie to marvel at, it was slapped away with a surprising amount of force.

So much force, in fact, that the porcelain of his hand cracked and splintered under it - a heavy, unnatural noise stopped the air dead, that is, of course, with the exception of Richie and Eddie yelling out, almost in a type of poetic unison;

“What the fuck?”   
“WHAT THE FUCK!?” 

Richie just stared dumbly at the cracks that had splintered at the back of his hand the whole way down to his wrist. It didn’t hurt, not at all - but if felt a little strange, a little uncomfortable and if Richie had’ve known, he may have likened the feeling to getting stitches, wound numb with local anaesthetic but being able to feel the pulling of the needle and thread.

Eddie was holding his hand like it was a weapon, switching between looking at his hand and Richie’s, trying to process  _ why _ the hand he had just slapped had not only made a noise like slapping a hand against the bathroom tiles, but why it had  _ cracked _ under him. 

The sound startled Stan more than anything else, and when he saw the cracks that had webbed up Richie’s hand he all but shoved Eddie out of the way - almost sending him straight into Beverly’s lap. Beverly rubbed soothing circles into Eddie’s arm as he rested his weight against the chair.

“Is your hand okay?” Stan asked, voice surprisingly gentle. Richie, dumbfounded, just nodded, “Let me look.” Stan held out the palm of his hand for Richie to present his own into - but it never came. Richie held onto his hand and eyed Stan - he trusted him. Of course he trusted Stan - every cell in his body was yanking him to do it, yanking and pulling at the non-physical parts of his being to let his injured hand fall into Stan’s - because Stan would look after him.

Stan was here to help.

The others had shuffled closer, beyond flabbergasted at what they had seen; which would soon turn into confusion so intense that it would splutter words from their lungs and drive them full of frantic bewilderment. 

“Richie - give me your hand,” Stan said - then he lowered his voice, just for Richie. No one else could really hear him, the words sought Richie’s ears and Richie truly believed that Stan could have shouted them from the rooftops and still only Richie would be able to truly hear, “I’m not going to hurt you, I just want to help.”

Richie dropped his hand into Stan’s.

Warmth flooded his veins and wrapped itself around his lungs, around his stomach, up through his neck and spread a happy, calm warmth on his face. Stan was  _ warm. _ Richie could  _ feel  _ warmth. It was bliss. Beyond bliss. Beyond anything that Richie had ever thought he’d needed. Right. It was right. It was what was meant to be - it was how he was  _ meant  _ to feel - which only made it seem so much more tragic when Stan dropped his hand back into his lap.

“Richie… how did you-” He started, only to be interrupted by Eddie.

“What the fuck, what the fuck, whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck -  _ what is he,”  _ Who was then shushed by Beverly, who clapped him on the shoulder. Hard. 

A chorus of faces, fear and amazement and confusion all at once. 

When he looked down, almost fearful himself, his hand was healed. No cracks - no splintered ceramic. As clean and as put-together as it had been mere moments ago. 

What the fuck. 

Stan steeled a breath. Richie was okay - at least, Richie apparently could heal himself - no, that didn’t feel right, Richie couldn’t quite do it on his own. 

Stan felt a tug, a slow type of warmth dragging out through his fingers and into Richie’s hand - not in the way that Richie’s cold porcelain skin had sucked the warmth out of him like a vacuum, no… more intentional, more generous, like Stan had allowed it, like Stan’s warmth sought Richie out and webbed over the shivers that have sliced through his skin, ugly and damaged. 

When he lifted his eyes from his own hands in bewilderment, Richie was staring at him, eyes bright and glittering against his sickly-even toned complexion. Heat bumbled in his belly, seeking out Richie’s cold touch once more. The tug of string pulled him, not harsh, not quickly; but softly, modestly. Richie felt safe with Stan; any remaining apprehension now swallowed up. Stan could feel this - the little tug of the string carried the feeling into his core and it was different, not quite his own.

Standing up, Stan addressed the crowd, “Are you going to let me explain?”

A pregnant pause and a chorus of nods.

“Please do - I think Eddie’s at risk for an aneurysm,” Ben said.

Eddie’s head shot up, “A what?!” 

  
  


So Stan explained everything. Every scrap of detail he could remember. A choir of pale faces and nervous - almost disbelieving faces nodded along at all the right bits. Richie had started off biting quips and adding his own comments with an eager grin sliced into his face. They dulled and simmered down until Richie was simply sitting on the seat, staring down at his toes and tapping little patters into his knees. By the end of it all, everyone was staring at him, confused and a little apprehensive. Richie started playing with the hem of his shorts again and Stan suspected that if he could, he would be flushed red from the attention.

No one really knew quite what to say and as Stan trailed off the room remained in an anguished hush. Eddie triggered his aspirator and Beverly continued to rub soothing circles with her thumb where she was squeezing Eddie’s shoulder in comfort, and more than likely keeping him upright too. 

Stan read the pull of Bill’s eyebrow and his nervous habit of licking his bottom lip as easy as he would have heard him speak.  _ ‘Are you sure about this?’ _

_ ‘Yes.’ _

_ ‘Okay.’ _ Bill believed him. You can’t lie from your face, the twitching of eyebrows and the expression of the eyes can’t possibly lie, Bill believed Stan with as much grandeur as possible in the awkward silence. 

Ben understood, too. Ben watched the silent conversation - that had only lasted the blink of an eye - and stood firm in his belief that he trusted Stan. He trusted Stan as he would any of the losers, as they all would with each other: with his life. 

“Say,” Ben started, the silence unceremoniously falling limp, “Richie… do you want to see our clubhouse?” Ben gave a genuine smile, and Richie responded likewise. 

  
Stan, on his way out of his bedroom as they all shuffled a little off-canter to their bikes, gave Ben’s arm a gentle squeeze.  _ Thank you. _


	5. Chapter 4: The Lone Ranger Issue #145

The clubhouse was Ben’s handiwork. Support beams and heavy makeshift walls from pallets and sheets of scrap metal and wood salvaged from the junkyard or floating down by the more polluted side of the Barrens, down by the Southern point bordering the outskirts of the town. They’d been sneaking down under the soil of the Earth for several years now and it became less of a clubhouse and more of a communal home away from home. Bill and Beverly tacked movie posters and band posters over the walls, Ben built a hammock which Eddie had claimed as his own, beanbags and benches fastened from pallets and air-tight boxes filled with comic books, old action figures and even a splintering apple box filled with whatever snacks Eddie and Bill ransacked from Mrs.K’s pantry. 

Many nights spent cuddled up with Beverly after she calls Stan on the home phone with a tight voice. Ashtray after astray filled and emptied and distractions with card games - most of which Stan  _ swears _ that Bill just made up. Evenings spent with Eddie, hip-to-hip on the beanbags, chatting about anything and everything until Stan says something that makes soda squirt out of Eddie’s nose. Endless summer days spent together in the cool earth, out of the heat of the sun in the little space they were all free to hide away from the unpleasantries of the world. Although the unpleasantries were ripe, Stan well and truly believed that there was always goodness glittering, catching sun and spraying kaleidoscope of colour in his heart even on the most horrible of days.

Richie immediately planted himself on one of the beanbags, making a masquerade of wiping non-existent sweat from his brow, “Wow Stanley, I’m never riding on the back of your bike again, I almost shattered onto the cement about seven times on the ride over.”

Stan brushed the dirt that had settled in his hair after closing the hatch behind him, “I told you that you should’ve ridden on Silver-” Richie’s confused face prompting, “Bill’s bike. She has a seat on the back - I just have spokes.” 

“I’m not riding on some old lady bike,” Richie said, shooting Bill a wide grin in response to the incredulous face Bill shot him. Stan pulled a rusting tin off one of the shelves, pulling the lid off with effort and pulling out colourful things and began his ritual of handing them out. All of them were girly, although Ben didn't seem the least bit perturbed slipping on a floral pink crown. He held one out towards Richie, who took it and examined it: a scrunched up slice of plastic with garishly coloured spots over it.

“What the fuck is this?” 

“It’s so you don’t get spiders in your hair,” Stan said with a smile. After the first time visiting the clubhouse after a summer of Ben working on it in secret, Stan had dusted the dirt and gravel from his hair and stopped off at the store before heading home with phantom spiders scuttling over his scalp and a pack of shower caps in his back pocket.

Richie scrunched the cap and threw it back into Stan’s chest, “We’re not scared of fucking spiders, Stanley… hey, is that a Superman comic?” 

Eddie, relaxing in the hammock with his hair tucked beneath a shower cap, angled his comic away from Richie’s eyes, “Uh…. yeah.”

“Can I read it?” Richie asked.

Beverly gestured towards one of the aged wooden boxes on the floor, “There are tons in there, Eddie and Bill can’t get enough of them.” Her long pigtails coiled and twisted to fit inside the cap, the tip of one poking out at the nape of her neck, tickling and itching it a little. Maybe all of Stan’s worry of bugs and spiders had gotten to her, every time her hair bristled against her neck she started and swiped at it. When Richie didn’t move she gestured Richie over with her hand, ash falling from her cigarette as she did so. She fell easily to her knees, not minding the layer of dirt and dust and patiently waited for Richie to somewhat awkwardly drop himself beside her with an awful clatter. “Eddie’s favourite is _Superman_ but we have some  _ Green Lantern, X-Men, Spiderman _ , and Bill has some issues of  _ Ghost Rider _ and  _ Swamp Thing _ in here somewhere… oh!  _ Tintin! _ I was wondering where this went… say, Richie, what ones do you like? I’m sure there’s something in here you can read.”

Feeling four sets of eyes watching his back: not a feeling, not like hairs standing on the back of your neck - an undisputed fact as clear as the sky is blue and water is wet. Not boring into his back, not unpleasant at all, in fact, it was oddly… comforting, all the more that he could pinpoint which set of eyes were Stan’s, a small current pulsing through him from a spot at the small of his back. Beverly watched with interest as he flicked through the stack of brightly coloured comics. None pulled at him. None particularly appealed to him. Achingly unfamiliar bright colours and sheen-coated covers, a feeling he repents - he has no right to feel this foreign familiarity. They get dirtier and dirtier and more dog-eared as he moves down the box. Colours fading and pages frayed and his fingertips growing black-

_ The Lone Ranger issue #145 _

A collision between a brick wall and his lungs, breath ripped from him. His vision suddenly and without warning flashing into darkness. No feeling. No more eyes on his back. No itching on his scalp. No dirt on his knees. No crinkled paper on his fingertips. No anything. A void. Untouchable and empty. 

And cold.

Not cold like ice or a cutting winter breeze. Cold in the more mundane and unceremonious sense of the coldness of cement, bathroom tile, polished cutlery. Less dramatic, less worthy of descriptions and all the more destructive in the familiarity. The coldness of vacancy, of nothing.

He should feel panicked, he’s sure. He didn’t know how utterly terrible the solitude of floating was until Stanley had pulled him out of it. And now, not even after a day, the warmth of Stanley had wormed his way inside him, glowing like soft coal underneath his chest. Richie is aware that if it were not for that comforting thrum of  _ Stan _ inside of him that he may find himself floating for real - out of touch and in a state of hypnosis. Not again.

No,  _ never _ again. 

_ ‘The Lone Ranger.’ _

A familiar voice. Deep and clear. Underneath the vague stench of this vacant place, Richie smells tobacco smoke. Pure, unfiltered, not like Beverly’s cigarette.

_ ‘You hear that, sport? Last issue - it’s been cancelled!’ _

Why? 

_ ‘Making way for the big dogs, think Spiderman! Batman! X-Men!’ _

An ache so palpable he chokes. A man smoking a pipe. Bushy moustache. Pale blue eyes. Richie tries to pin any other features but he’s blurred. Underwater, rippling underneath ducks’ wings. The water stills. A closer look, squinting. The man is close, just below the surface, if Richie leans in just a little closer, a little more-

The eyes switch a horrible yellow.

The coldness exploded around him in a terrible act of fireworks. Rising into the black abyss on a cold autumn night to explode into a beautiful act of colours and burning heat. Heat surrounding him from the inside out. Thundering towards the ground and splitting the concrete and lying there slow and lethargic as the world bled back into saturation.

The coal inside him now aflame. Stan’s hands holding his shoulders in a firm grip. Blinking the film from his eyes, the delicate comic had ripped under his tightly clenched fists. The suddenness of his consciousness had left him winded and spluttering. Confused and worried glances.

“Richie, were you…?” Stan said. He didn’t quite have a word for it - he felt it all the same. Where Richie bubbled and webbed inside him suddenly turned flat. Salt laying flat and lifeless at the bottom of his veins, artificial and damned. The word, which Richie had tried to mouth and gasp out to him, found its way onto the tip of Stan’s tongue through Richie’s pulled brow and twitching shoulders, “Floating?” 

Richie grappled at Stan’s hand. The comic crumpled and forgotten in his lap. Squeezing tight, grounding. Warmth settling him back into his surroundings. The emptiness and the total loss of his sense of proprioception slowly fading as reality comes back. The smell of the dirt, brittle knees on a dirt floor, fingers and palms smudged black from sifting through the comic books. His breathing steadying - not that he really needed to breathe, but the habit was there. Holding his breath, although he knew it wouldn’t cause him any harm filled him with a sense of unease and left him a little disjointed. 

“Is he-” 

“Fine. I’m fine,” Cutting Ben off, his hand still squeezing at Stan’s on his shoulder, the warmth, amber honey through a sunset, golden and holy: addictive. More so than alcohol or drugs he was sure, “Just spaced out - haha! You know how it is - puppet things. Oh - I ruined your comic, look... tore the cover to fucking shreds. Aww geez. This was the final issue, too - basically a collector’s edition. None of you are a fan, obviously... how the fuck did you get it so messed up so quick? I mean… I know I know I just tore it apart but you guys obviously weren’t taking very good care of it. I mean it’s been out - what? A week?” Richie’s hand slipped from Stan, feeling effectively warm and whole again, and had taken to pointing at the water-damage over the comic. 

Pointed looks, which Richie couldn’t decipher, were exchanged between the others. Bill’s flat eyes, Beverly’s quip of the eyebrow, Eddie’s scrunch of his nose, Ben’s cock of the head and Stan’s breath missing a beat. It meant something. A non-verbal exchange that Richie’s knew meant something. He was drawing a blank. The context just out of reach and slightly agitated - he didn’t like being out of the look - he waved the comic in point, “What?!” 

Bill - eyes drawn to the comic, back and forth to Richie, “It was my duh-dad’s.” 

God - these folks aren’t all that bright, are they? “No - look - the issuing date. August first,” - exasperatingly, blank stares - even Stan, “You see, don’t you? You know what I mean, right Stan?” But the downward pull of eyebrows was enough even  _ without _ the little burning pit of confusion in his own chest. Stan’s confusion. 

The thought struck him suddenly and he hadn’t quite known why he hadn’t thought about it before. How long had he been floating? It was cold outside, everyone (bar him) wearing thick, heavy coats and a lopsided pile of gloves lay on one of the benches. The nights were long, but not obscenely so. 

“What date do you think it is, Richie?” Beverly asked, leaning into his space a little.

  
“Fuck, I don’t know. February?”   
  
“What year?” Her voice gentle.

When Richie said his reply, he said it uneasily. The answer weighed wrong and stilted in his mouth, it took a lot of force to even get it out when he replied with an uncertain, “Nineteen-sixty-one?” The air grew still and everyone, once watching him carefully with uncomfortable fidgeting, shot stiff. The pause was long and no one spoke for a heavy moment.

“Richie-” 

“Nope,” Eddie said, cutting Stan off with his hands, “He’s lying. This is a prank. Well newsflash, asshole,” He rounds to Richie, “This isn’t fucking funny.”

Richie matched his tone, frightened out of his shits, “No shit it isn’t funny - why are you all looking at me like that?!” Desperately, trying to meet eyes with anyone - everyone dropped their gaze to the floor, or to the walls, or to their nails - everyone except… “Stan?”

Stan hadn’t looked away - not for a moment, too wrapped up trying to figure out what this could all mean. He wasn’t sure - but he knew it wasn’t good. He could feel Richie’s anxiety bubbling in his chest. With a turn to Eddie, “He’s not lying,” To Richie, “It’s… it’s nineteen-eighty-nine.”   
  


Richie slumped onto the floor, smoothing over the comic book in his hand, trying to level himself somewhat.

Eddie exploded, “No! I’m sorry,” turning back to the others, eyes wide and skin pale, fingers shaking and fumbling at the zip of his fanny pack, “I didn’t want to go into Neibolt in the first place - I  _ told _ you it was a bad idea. And look - now we have…  _ that?!” _ He gestured with his aspirator towards Richie, “What are you planning on doing with him, Stan? What, are you just gonna keep him around like a stray dog? What if he’s dangerous?!” A firm puff on the aspirator.   
  


The pang of Richie’s hurt lurched the words out of Stan’s mouth, “He’s not dangerous - look at him, Eddie.” Richie gave a forced smile which was probably intended to look innocent but only served to sit right on the edge of unsettling.

“Oh yeah, this is just great. Fucking wonderful. It’s clearly a prank,” Eddie turned to the rest of the Losers to back him up, “Right?! I mean - seriously. A doll -  _ puppet, _ whatever-” when Richie corrected him, “came to life? Don’t you think it’s more likely he’s just a weirdo who climbed through your window and made this whole story up?” 

“No, I heard a voice-” 

“Yeah! You heard a voice, Stan. You’re hearing voices. That sure does make me feel better.”

“Eddie…” Bill said, trying to mediate the situation but he struggled to find anything to say. The clubhouse grew quiet as he wet his lips to try and think of something to say, “We all suh-saw his hand w-w-when you slapped it, Eddie,” Everyone nodded at that, Richie rubbed at the spot that had cracked, making an eye-wincing noise, “There’s n-n-no way they’re luh-lying, right?”

“Skin doesn’t crack,” Ben agreed, “and skin doesn’t make  _ that _ type of noise.” Richie stopped rubbing his hand and let it fall onto his lap.

With a heavy sigh, Beverly - who had not moved from her position opposite Richie, pushed the box of comics out of her way and addressed him, “Can I take your hand?” 

“Depends,” Richie said, “Where are you taking it?”

“Ha-ha,” She said sarcastically, her face spreading with a soft smile when Richie offered his hand to her. When she took it, chalk-pale against her own, his skin was cold, sure. But something was bubbling inside her. Something familiar and something  _ special. _ Like that, in an instant, she trusted Richie with her life - as she would any of the Losers. He was one of them now. One of  _ them. _

Beverly’s hand was spreading some type of warmth through him, more subtle than Stan’s, less golden honey and more like languid spring sunlight. Comforting and strong. It was not what Richie had expected to feel when she took his hand and he almost pulled his arm away when he felt it. Beverly squeezed his hand lightly and Richie looked at her and somehow the raise of her ginger eyebrow and the slight of her smile asked, ‘ _ Do you feel it too? _ ’ Richie nodded - somewhat dumbly, not entirely sure  _ how _ or  _ why _ he knew exactly what those microexpressions were saying. Beverly’s face lit up in glee. In openness, a wide and genuine smile that said  _ ‘you’re one of us, Richie, aren’t you?’ _ and Richie’s reply stuck in a lump in his throat.

Beverly put Richie’s hand gently back on his lap and she turned to the group, who had all watched silently as Beverly did what she had to do. Her voice was clear and unfaltering, “I believe them. I believe Stan,  _ of course _ I believe Stan. We don’t lie to each other, right?” She stood up and didn’t brush the dirt off of her pants, “We never have and we never will. Sure, it’s unlikely. Sure, it doesn’t make sense. But guys,” She paused a beat, “He’s one of us,” When no one replied it was because they were too busy trying to unravel the gravity of her words, she continued, “Take his hand - don’t look at me like that. Trust me, you’ll feel it as soon as you do.” 

The silence was almost worrisome. Almost too much. Richie was seconds away from twisting his hands into the fabric of his shorts when Bill stepped forward, a solemn nod to Beverly. A nod like he was going into battle or something. As if taking Richie’s hand into his own was an express ticket to  _ Valhalla _ . Big drama queen. 

Bill crouched down in front of Richie and gave him a nervous smile. He was handsome, Richie figured. A bit disproportioned with the giraffe neck and the elephant ears but hey, nobody’s perfect. With his hand extended, Richie took his hand, a handshake without the shake. Sure enough, warmth spread from his palm through his body. Different than Stan, different than Beverly. Less warm and more lukewarm. Tepid, like there’s something holding back the real warmth and joy. Richie let go of his hand quickly, feeling too much like he was reading into something private, something personal. A quick glance was all it took to catch the millisecond of Bill’s eyes widening and his mouth stuttering over silent words,  _ ‘Holy shit,’ _ and Richie couldn’t help but snort at that.

Ben took Bill’s place before Bill even had time to fully stand upright. If Bill does something, they’re all too willing to follow suit. Even Eddie, who was nibbling on a hangnail, looked less scared and more curious than anything at this point. Ben didn’t outstretch his hand, he waited for Richie to come to him, let him test the waters himself or something, like he was a stray cat coming for milk and head scratches. Duly noted: head scratches wouldn’t go amiss right about now, his scalp was itching like crazy. Richie reached out and covered Ben’s hand with his own where it was sitting on Ben’s knee. The warmth, red-hot but placid. Strong but unthreatening. Burning embers, a settled burning from a low stove-fire. Richie took his hand away to itch at his scalp and Ben’s double blink and holding stare said,  _ ‘You should have taken one of the shower caps,’ _ Richie made a face and slapped at his skull. The noise made everyone - including Richie - wince.

All eyes on Eddie. Eddie looked quickly between everyone, chewing frantically on his nails like a beaver to a log. He’s gonna chomp his fucking fingers off if he isn’t careful. Sure enough, Bill pushed him gently towards Richie, “Go on, Eddie.” 

With his fingers tapping anxiously against his fanny pack, he approached Richie. He didn’t kneel down as everyone else had. He shot his hand out that violently that he almost hit Richie another sharp round the head, “Hey! Watch your fucking hands.”

“Just hold my hand, dumbass,” Eddie said, pointedly looking away.

“Aww,” Richie cooed, “Does Eds wanna hold my hand?” Obnoxious kissing noises. Eddie turned to walk away but was steeled in place by Stan, who had one hand on his shoulder and the other on the small of his back. From Richie’s angle, it looked like Stan had a gun against Eddie’s back - and Eddie’s nervous disposition didn’t offset the notion at all, “Hey, alright. Give me your tiny girl hands and let’s get this over with -  _ oh _ they’re soft - do you moisturize?” 

“No I don’t  _ moisturize _ I just have naturally soft skin it’s not uncommon, in fact, it’s actually a sign of healthy skin and if your skin is rough and calloused it’s probably a sign you need more Vitamin A but not too much because you can overdose on it,” Eddie barrelled, not yet letting go of Richie’s hand. Eddie’s warmth was almost nauseatingly fast, like a waterfall gushing into a still pond, settling only seconds after.

“Wait, you can duh-die from t-too many v-v-vitamins?” Bill asked, genuinely intrigued.

Eddie lifted his palm from Richies, “Yeah - vitamin A toxicity, that’s why pregnant women can’t eat liver because it’ll make their baby fall out.” 

“I don’t think it _‘falls out’_,” Beverly said.

“I-” Bill looked around at everyone, “I ate tuh-two flinstone vitamin guh-gummies today instead of one. Am I guh-guh-gonna get sick?” Genuine concern on his face.

Eddie took a deep breath and his eyebrows knit together,  _ ‘How does he dress himself in the morning?’ _

Richie kicked Eddie’s foot to grab his attention and his lopsided, toothy grin replied  _ ‘Yeah, doesn’t his t-shirts get stuck on those ears?’ _ , Eddie stifled a chuckle at that and kicked Richie’s foot back.

“I think it means your baby is gonna fall out, Bill,” Richie said loudly, hooting with laughter. 

Despite himself, Bill laughed too, and Eddie and Stan rolled their eyes at them both. After the laughter died down, Bill asked, “Buh-but, I’m not guh-gonna die, right?” and poor Bill didn’t get an answer because everyone soon was thrown back into fits. Even Stan had covered his laughter with his hand and tried to turn away from Bill. Ben clapped him on the shoulder and moved off to poke around the shelves for something to entertain themselves with.

Laughter brightening his sombre mood and five types of warmth and love circulating slowly through him, Richie felt almost complete. There were still a couple of things missing, he knew that much. He knew there was an empty space at the bottom of his ribcage and he knew that these flashbacks… memories… whatever they were - meant something. For now, he embraces what he has. Five friends. 

Five friends that he would die for, if it came to that. 

The others felt it too. Bill knew this. A little bit of Richie in each of them. Not as potent as Stan, who swears that a physical part of Richie’s subconscious exists inside him whenever he gets a pang of Richie’s emotions pulling at his chest. But a little bit all the same. Enough to know that Richie’s sticking his tongue out as he helps Ben reach something on the top shelf because his joints are stiff. Enough to know that Richie’s lopsided smile at him, Bill, is mocking his  _ old-lady bike. _ Enough to know that the way he and Stan look at each other … two pieces of a puzzle. Two halves of a whole. Two sides of a coin. Entwined together and instantly empirical.

With resignation that his worries will go unanswered, Bill watches as Richie flicks through the comics once more, spending more time on the newer ones with shiny covers, while Eddie talks rapidly about them, pointing at characters on the covers, “Hey, Richie?,” Bill said, catching both Eddie’s and Richie’s attention, “Welcome to the club.”

“The club?” 

Beverly, from behind Richie, pulls a shower cap over his head and his eyes, a shouting and grappling fit followed by Richie peeking out at her from the plastic cap, lifting it to free one of his eyes, “Yeah, the  _ Losers’ Club,”  _ She said.

“Geez, Beverly. I haven’t heard  _ that _ name in a while,” Ben said. Beverly shrugged and finally dusted the dirt off of her pants. She moved back over to the shelf and put the lid back on the tin that she had pulled the obscenely coloured cap from and handing it back to Stan, who put it where it went - a very particular spot which everyone seems to always miss by an inch or two. With the light of a cigarette and pushing one of her pigtails back into the cap, Beverly spoke hushed to Stan, “What happened your cheek?” 

Stan paused and his silence was answer enough but with a quick look to Beverly from the side of his eye,  _ ‘You know.’ _

She looked sad for a moment, not quite pitying, more empathetic. The details didn’t need to be said. He couldn’t bring himself to go into the gory details of being whitewashed. It looked like a scab, roadburn perhaps. With the Bowers gang spearing their wheels with sticks and rocks as they cycle past them, they’re all too familiar with the feeling of roadburn. 

He could feel Richie looking at him, and when he met Richie’s eyes they were trained on his cheek. Richie shot him a tender smile and turned back to quarrelling with Eddie over comic books. 

“Where do you feel him?” Beverly asked, watching the unspoken interactions between the two. Stan thought a little about it, and as he did, she continued, “Inside you. He’s here-” she pointed to a spot over her right breast, “I feel him here.” 

“How does he feel?” Not like he did with Stan, he knew as much. Not as important or tangible or unforgivingly present at all times. All the emotions, tugging and pulling at the spot in his chest. Currently: content, enjoying one of Eddie’s Superman comics despite his objections. 

Beverly contemplates this. Absent-mindedly fiddling with the key around her neck. The answer wasn’t going to be positive. The correlation is enough to make Stan want to reach out and give her a hug. After a minute of thinking, trying to search for a word that accurately conveys the feeling without dismissing it or understating it, “Lost,” She said, “He feels lost.” 

“He is everywhere, mostly. All the time. Like he’s flowing through my veins just as much as I am. Like I’m equal parts Richie as I am myself. But… here,” He pressed his palm into the center of his chest, “A lot here.”

Beverly opened her mouth to say something when-

“Fuh-found ‘em!” Bill said, loud enough to draw everyone’s attention. In one of the corners of the clubhouse, standing triumphantly with a palm-sized box caked in mud, his forearm covered in the stuff and a maple leaf stuck to his forearm, “The puh-pack of cards - they f-f-fell behind the s-s-seats, remember?”

“Your arm is filthy,” Stan said, screwing up his nose.

“Yeah, Bill. If those Flinstone Vitamins don’t make your baby fall out, Polio in that mud will,” Richie said, squinting over at Bill. 

“Leave Bill and his baby alone,” Beverly said.

“You know,” Bill said wiping the dirt from his forearm onto his jeans, “I’m starting to think you guys are saying I look fat,” With difficulty, opening the box and shuffling the cards, wordlessly, Stan and Beverly took places on the beanbags in front of Bill as he dealt the cards, and Eddie (pulling Richie by the sleeve of his Freese’s tee) and Ben soon joined.

“I guess you could stand to lose a few pounds,” Ben said, taking his cards and shifting through them, he smiled behind them bashfully when everyone had a quick laugh at this, “What are we playing, Bill?” 

Some five games into Gofish (Stan, as always, in the lead with Bill and Ben flanking his rear), with Richie still picking up the rules slowly, and Eddie sitting beside him patiently explaining the rules time and time again, the air was light, the conversation familiar and if not for the noise of Richie’s porcelain skin against the ground or his knees, then it would be all too easy to forget about the gravity of their predicament. 

“Stan,” Beverly said, eyes sparkling steeled blue, “Six.” 

“Go fish,” He said.

“No,” she put her cards on the floor, “Six. We’re waiting on one more - right? I remember you said so before we went into Neibolt.” The sound of Richie shifting in his beanbag. Eddie looking nervous at the very mention of the House. 

“Yeah. Yeah, we are,” He said, it was a fact, after all. 

“Uhhh, no we’re not,” Richie said, pointing at himself, “Whatever happened to _‘save the best for last’_?” 

“' _ Age before beauty' _ more like,” Stan said, looking over his cards again.

“OOOH! Yowza! Yowza! And Uris hits  _ below the belt! _ Time-out, time-out, we’re witnessing sum foul play he’e comin’ to ya live!” Richie said, speaking into an invisible microphone and posing with dramatics.

“What the hell was that?” 

“It’s my wrestling-commentator voice, dear Longstockings,” He puffed his chest, “I’m gonna be a radio star one day, my voices will be world-famous. The Man With A Thousand Voices - that’s what they’ll call me!” 

“But… it just sounded like  _ your _ voice, Richie,” Ben said.

Richie didn’t fault, “Well you’re about to eat your words, Haystack,” He splaid his cards on the ground, “Royal Flush, baby! Read ‘em and weep!” 

Eddie pinched the bridge of his nose, “No, we’re not playing poker, Richie -” 

“I should still win, look at that hand!”

“Those aren’t the rules of the fucking game!”

“Well, maybe the rules are bullshit!”

“Hey… it’s nuh-not the rules’ fuh-fault…”

Back and forth, quarrelling and bickering continued. So easy back and forth it was as though Richie wasn’t a new member at all - in fact, they were starting to think maybe he wasn’t. Falling so quickly into place, a place which had been carved for him all along. Bonding so quickly and saying dirty jokes to Eddie with a lift of his brow, making biting comments to Stan with a scrunch of his nose, asking to see Beverly’s bra with a purse of his lips. It was so easy, so natural. Predetermined strings of friendship had been there all along, waiting for Richie to come along and fill the space. 

With the realities of the complexity of Richie’s, and thereby association, all of their predicament looming over their heads, they pushed the thoughts back. Somehow knowing, somehow seeing the darkness ahead, the trials and tribulations (although there is no possible way they would ever truly anticipate the severity of them), the hardship steering towards them splitting open blackened seas with sickly yellow seafoam. They could feel it, seeping through their winter coats and through the goosebumps of their skin. 

  
For now, however, they welcomed the pleasantries of spending time with each other. With having fun. Stan, staring blankly at his hand, wondered what was the point in sitting around having good rounds of chucks (a term of Richie's) when he could feel pain brooding in his future? With a glance to Richie, face bright with laughter and eyes sparkling, he knew the answer was, of course:  _ because  _ the future was going to be painful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you think ! :)   
@georgiedenbrough on tumblr


	6. Interlude: The Monsters Can't Get Us Here

Days flew by disorientingly fast. This notion hit him when unrolling Richie’s sleeping bag (which now was kept under Stan’s bed during the day time rather than in the closet) that it had been this night one week ago that Richie had popped into his life. The routine, although unstable at first when Bill suggested Richie stay at his until they figure out a plan, Bill’s parents would hardly notice an extra pair of footsteps treading mud up the stairs. It was a good plan, a temporary and well-needed relief of being free of the responsibility of Richie, the risk of being caught and having to lie on the spot was hardly something Stan was prepared to do, no matter how gilded he could speak at times.

But Stan could hardly be awarded that luxury of temporary lightening his shoulders, because not two minutes after Stan and Bill with Richie parted ways (Richie kicking Silver’s frame like a horse, curating a terrible cowboy accent), a pain in Stan’s chest. It rumbled. It glowed. Warm… hot… burning. Debilitating. It was all Stan could do to veer off onto the sidewalk and try to catch himself. The rubber of his handlebars made violent imprints in his palm when he was able to pull away. It only eased when he half-walked half-crawled his bike in the direction that Bill had sped off, only to be met partway with Bill and a panting Richie, clutching at his chest and groaning into the fur of Bill’s hood where his face was smushed against his shoulder blades.

An unspoken agreement was then made: stay together. 

The ache was somewhat familiar. A dull stomach ache whenever Eddie would be under house-arrest for weeks at a time. Lethargy when Bill and his parents would drive to Bangor over the Easter period to spend time with relatives. Headaches whenever Beverly would spend weeks of summer vacation at her aunt’s in Portland. A constant crick in the neck whenever Ben spent six weeks at that architecture camp last year. With Richie it only seemed to fit that it would be strength enough to debilitate him.

  
So every night Stan would sneak Richie upstairs, whispering at him harshly for his heavy footsteps. Richie would wait patiently and silently upstairs for Stan to finish his dinner, which Stan would have to describe when he comes back up. Beef Stroganoff -  _ oh wow, real beef? you must be loaded! I guess the stereotypes are true… l’chaim! _

Late in from spending the day at Big Bill’s of which Richie watched in  _ amazement _ as Bill booted up his NES and made an attempt to talk through the controls with Richie. In the end, Richie had jumped up on Bill’s bed and hollored in victory - only to flump down onto the duck feather pillows when Ben pointed out that Richie had been staring at Bill’s side of the screen the entire time. Stan didn’t care much for the video games that Bill (and increasingly, Richie) seemed to happily spend  _ hours _ playing. Usually Bill would play split-screen with Ben. Beverly, Eddie and Stan would play catch in Bill’s backyard. Since Georgie disappeared, it was uncomfortable to play catch amongst Georgie’s swingset and soccer net - the latter of which had grown a strange greenish colour on the netting since being left out in the cold and damp all this time. It seemed like a metaphor. Nature reclaiming what was once Georgie’s. Another day, another quarter-inch of moss, another second towards Doomsday.

It grew later and later, the sun long unhinged from the clouds and Beverly made the brilliant suggestion of hitting  _ Don’s _ on the way home. Don’s - grimy, and a little on the side of suspicion, staffed exclusively by burly Italian men, tattooed from head to toe who always seemed surprised to see anyone walking through the doors at any time of day - despite it being a 24/7 diner. But, as Bill so wisely said, “I duh-don’t care if they’re muh-money languishing, it’s super cheap and the fuh-food is good,” It was true and it was all the convincing they took. Richie spent thirty minutes marvelling at the ice cream display, the range of flavours, none of which he could taste. 

Well fed and well socialized,Stan and Richie both pretty much passed out the second their heads hit the pillow from the long day spent with their friends. 

Stan’s deep sleep didn’t last long. 

The sound of muffled shattering rustled him from his slumber. His blanket twisted heavily around his legs and he instinctively kicked them off. The noises were rhythmic. A metronome of ceramic demolition. It took him a moment to wake up, to understand the potential gravity of those horrific noises, but when he did his eyes blew open and he shot up in bed, head swivelling around the room fast enough to make his neck crack uncomfortably. 

His eyes needed to adjust. The room dark. Unnaturally dark. Brightened only by the cautionary yellow streamlight of the moon, beam stiff as a flashlight. Jaundice warping the baby blue wallpaper and warm oak skirting. Oak like his furniture - his dresser, his chair, his desk- 

None of which are there. His room bare. Empty. Even his carpet pulled from the floor, cold concrete meeting the corners of his barren walls. No pictures, no posters - nothing. In fact, the only piece of furniture left in his room was the very bed he was sitting on and the blanket he had kicked to the ground. It was cold, even in his winter pajamas, the frost cracked across the window and obstructed any view Stan would otherwise have of the street and the skies.

  
An ear-splitting shatter.

In the corner, where the noise had directed Stan’s vision, Richie. Curled in on himself and facing the corner, the walls warped around him. Shoulder blades sharp as knives and the speedbumps of his spine heavy with shadows, even through his tee. It wasn’t until after Stan softly called out Richie’s name did he register the shaking shoulders, back bowing in and out with heaving breaths. Just like the first night they met.

“Richie?” Silence, “Rich?!” More frantically, with a lack of response, Stan grappled himself out of the blankets - didn’t he kick them off? He pulled at the blankets but they wrapped tight around his legs and when he thought he was free and stood up, ready to rush to Richie, they knotted around his ankle. When Stan’s nose smashed into the unforgiving concrete, the crunching of gravel under a workman’s boot. The pain wasn’t in his nose, his hand instinctively pressed into the shattered cartilage, but there was no pain. The pain, white-hot pins and needles: his mouth. Almost too painful to think straight, but Stan’s initial shout of pain had caused Richie to make a sort of choked-sob in response and it spurred him on.

“Richie…” Garbled and nonsensical. His chin streamed wet and sticky and he didn’t need to look to know it was blood - he could feel it pooling in his mouth. More blood than he had ever bled before. It dripped heavily from his mouth with the taste of copper. Arms shaking with effort, pushed from the ground and crawled towards Richie's back. With a great deal of difficulty, his hand clamped down on Richie’s shoulders. There was the briefest stretch of warmth. 

With a little force, he turned Richie to face him and there, Stan saw the worst thing he’d ever seen in his life. Richie with a needle and thread....  _ Sewing _ his mouth shut. 

Stan tried to say something, scream maybe, but all that came out was a splattering of blood waterfalling onto his pajama bottoms. Little grey stripey things that were made from some type of expensive cotton. Rarely worn, ironed and folded with a scientific measure of care, saturated red. 

The string of red vibrated in Richie’s shaking hands. Richie, whose eyes were pinched shut, tried to push Stan away, pushing him with his spare hand, his legs, even shouldering him with gated roughness. Stan made another weak attempt at words, Richie pulled the threads on his mouth tighter, visibly wincing and shoulders stiffening. It hurt. It was hurting him. Sheet-white hand twisting into the hem of his shorts. 

  
“Richie…” Stan spat out as much of the oncoming flow as he could to clear his mouth out enough to speak, “What are you doing?!” Frantic, Richie shook his head and kicked warningly at Stan’s stomach. When the needle pierced his mouth, shockwaves cracked up his face. “No no - please,” Stan spitting red all over the pale of Richie’s face, the needle stilled penetrating his lips and Richie pushed on Stan’s chest. 

Tear tracks cut down the blood on both their cheeks as Stan continued to beg Richie to stop, please for the love of God,  _ stop it _ . Less and less legible every time. When Richie pulled the needle through his lips, fat tears falling from his chin, Stan did all he can think to do - and snatched the needle from Richie’s shaking grip and pulled the thread loose. 

Richie’s eyes blew open. Pupils pinholed in panic, bloodshot and glassy with tears. He’s screaming into his own mouth, face contorted in an ugly expression as he pounded on Stan’s chest. He wasn’t angry, oh no. He was terrified. The muffled screaming, the walls shrunk inwards. The muffled screaming, weighted blankets coiling around Stan’s ankles. The muffled screaming, the thread hung loosely from Richie’s mouth. Fanning peculiarly from the breaths in and out of his nose. When Stan reached for it, Richie pounded Stan’s chest so hard he could hear his, Richie’s, hand cracking, or was it his own sternum? 

The thread weighed like steel when Stan started to pull it. Richie froze. Whites of his eyes like dinner plates and he simply sat there, waiting for the inevitable. Stan smiled, scared shitless. He cupped Richie’s face to say _it’s ok - it’s over now_. Richie didn’t understand what he was trying to say. He couldn’t understand him. Something was wrong. Something was happening. With a couple of stitches loose-

Water. A spluttered cough of water when Richie was able to part his lips. Sickly grey… murky and… dear god, the stench. It was all Stan could do not to leap away from the strangely viscous water globbing out from Richie’s mouth in fat clots. 

Stan didn’t stall. He kept pulling and pulling. Richie’s mouth was free. Parted, lips blue and thick with slick. The thread kept going. On and on and on. Stan couldn’t see it. He could only feel it. The weight of the thread. Richie: a ghost. Stan followed his eyes, brimming with fresh, grieving tears.

Oh, there it is. Fusing into the center of his own bare chest. His pajamas were gone. His thighs were prickled with goosebumps. Red string into his chest. He gave it a testing tug and Richie’s stomach visibly jumped and he made an empty crying sort of noise. Stan didn’t want to pull it anymore. It hurt. It hurt a lot. He didn’t stop pulling. No. No no no no no no no no - 

  
A shard of porcelain ripped from his chest. Stan’s ragged screams ripped there too. He didn’t stop screaming when it fell to the floor with a hollow sound. He didn’t stop screaming. Not from pain. Not from agony. Not from his veins and his mesentery hanging out of him like a pumpkin half-way scooped. He screamed from something a lot scarier: nothing at all. 

If the choice had been presented to him: lose a limb or lose that shard of Richie? Stan would have presented even his dominant arm before the question even finished. Hell, he’d get the hacksaw himself. He’d get the rusted vegetable knife himself. He’d gnaw it off himself and not blink at the veins flossing between his teeth and the toughness of the muscle or the twang of his tendons. He’d shatter his teeth on his bone and spit the chunks out, frustrated that they were getting in the way.

Another current of blood from his mouth. A violent riptide from his mouth to the ground. There, it mixed with sickly water. Splutters of the stuff. Infrequent in both its intensity and its viscosity and Richie was trying to speak through it. He couldn’t speak, his throat filled with water and it was all he could do to choke around the mess. Growing sicker. Paler. Skin cracking and splintering into speckles of china around the edges. Fat, heavy swells of the same disgusting water cut down his face. It made his eyes look glassy, like cataracts. A moment away from death, with a haunting noise of fear turned resigned acceptance, Richie grabbed Stan’s face in a weak hold and pressed their mouths together.

Should sparks fly? shouldn’t this feel amazing? butterflies, stomach twisting and blood rushing south? is that not the experience of such things? Stan wonders, because this feels terrible. The cold press of Richie’s lips,shattered beyond recognition, ripped into his lips and all the more blood. All the more the blood and water mixed. Empty, without feeling Richie pooling in his veins, Stan understood. He understood all too horribly when Richie began to pull away. Stan tried to grab for him, but he was too late. It wasn’t a kiss - it was a goodbye.

And there, with the jaundiced moon illuminating the horror of it all, the cracks on Richie’s face grew. They splintered. They rushed up his face, down his chest, across his neck, a Jackson Pollock set in preservation by Stan screaming, screaming in choked silence. The room fell eerily silent when Richie’s porcelain frame turned to dust with a final choked cry and a final spluttering of rancid water. The shards cut into his skin, the dust sucked up his nose and he was all alone. Truly alone. He had killed Richie. With a tug on the string, Richie died drowning and it was all Stan’s fault. 

The shadow of his walls blinked. Jaundiced growing brighter. Alighting. The Earth trembled, shards of porcelain jittering in place in a way that with disgust, reminded Stan of cockroaches. Then he felt it. He felt It. A smell so foul he couldn’t help but retch despite the sobering sense of doom. He braced himself as it swelled, bigger and bigger and his palms beading with blood from the shards on the stained concrete. 

  
When It spoke, It spoke silently. The same way the Turtle did. Not all the same, though. It didn’t speak with a calm authority, with a pious reverberation up Stan’s spine. No… God, no. It’s voice was overwhelming. Nails on a chalkboard, so demanding of attention it was painful, expanding in his skull, squashing his brain up to the skull into a paste. Skull swelling and immeasurable pressure at his temples. It spoke not as communication, but as punishment,  _ “You could never save him, Stanley.” _ The shadows on his wall twisted. Sharp and angular. All claws and pointed teeth and slits of rumbling yellow eyes.  _ “He’s mine. He’ll always be mine. And this time I’m gonna kill him. I’m gonna kill him and you won’t be able to save him.”  _

Stan hadn’t realised he was screaming. But he was. Raw and jagged, blood gurgling in his throat. The pressure grew and grew and Stan could feel his skull about to pop. 

** _pop. _ **

** _ pop._ **

** _ pop._ **

** _ POP!_ **

** _ POP!_ **

** _POP!_ **

** _ POP! POP!_ **

** _ POP POP POP POP POP-_ **

“I can save him,” He managed. The popping grew louder. All around him now, “He’s my friend…. He’s my friend and I lo-”

** _POP!_ **

Stan woke up violently.

He sat up fast enough to make him go lightheaded and looked around frantically. The moon was a pale, perfectly normal white and the blue-haze of Derry set a city glow over his room. He recounted his furniture in place, and the pictures on his wall and his perfectly clean carpet and… a pain that made him choke. Richie. Stan clutched at his pajama top over the center of his chest, eyes prickling with relief and gasping heavy, desperate pants.

A hearty bang, which Stan recognised as the sound that had woken him up in the first place. Richie, on the ground, squirming and mumbling uncomfortably. Twisting and turning violently underneath his sleeping bag, wrestling with it. Richie’s face was ugly with expressions - all negative. Fear, worry… pain? It was that recognition of pain that made Stan all but jump from his bed and down beside him. In his movements, he swore he saw a shadow creeping up his wall but it was gone before Stan got the chance to look. He paid it no mind and Stan called Richie softly, then a little louder, then a lot louder and still he didn’t stir. So Stan tried to shake him awake. With that explosion of heat through him, he felt it. The panic, the fear. It was familiar as it shot through him, a horrible flipbook of brief and scattered glimpses of horrible, horrible depths of fear. The hair on his arms stood upright and he could taste salt on his upper lip. With a violent shake and another calling of his name, Richie woke.

Richie woke up and immediately started thrashing, eyes squeezed shut and arms swinging, mumbling and grumbling explicits that Stan couldn’t really pinpoint, he was too busy trying to avoid Richie’s fists, Stan tried one more attempt at a calming call of Richie’s name and seemed to stir him in the wrong direction. Richie, whose arms were now held in the tight grip of Stan’s hands, bolted upright and with a deep breath, shouted, “You’re not taking me alive!” and promptly slammed his head forward to headbutt Stan. Only Richie missed miserably, succeeding to slam his jaw into the sharp jut of Stan’s shoulder. And when it hit, it hit HARD. A horrible sound, the stuff of Stan’s nightmares. 

Richie shattered his jaw. 

A huge chunk, the size of Stan’s palm, landed in his lap. The rest splintered on to the carpet. Richie’s face was now veined with cracks. Some thick crevices up the side of his cheek, others little spider veins that flirted around his neck. To Stan, they were equally as bad. All rivers lead to the ocean and Richie’s gaping jaw was a vortex in the Pacific. Richie’s delicate fingers clattered against the jagged edges of where his jaw had snapped off, screeching sound from his fingertips. Richie seemed little more than confused or perhaps mildly perturbed when he blinked groggily at Stan and mumbled, “Wss ahhnin?” 

Stan, blanche with shock could only reply, “Richie?” Richie, so composed, so easy to take things in stride. Then he remembers how he found him, crying and shaking with agonising fear. Maybe… maybe whatever Richie had been dreaming about was  _ worse _ than this. Worse than waking up with your jaw missing. 

Stan’s eyes snapped to the movement in front of him. Richie picked up the shard that was now lying in Stan’s lap and with his other hand, pointed to his face, with a questionable look of,  _ ‘Is this my fucking jaw?’ _

Stan swallowed, his words failing him. He met Richie’s eyes,  _ ‘Yes.’ _

_ ‘Fuck.’  _ Richie moved to throw the shard at the wall, arm bent back to propel it and in a moment of sudden, frantic energy, Stan leapt forward on his knees and snatched it from Richie’s hand. He couldn’t just…  _ throw _ his jaw at the wall. Even if he could mend a new one. It just felt wrong. Richie watched with judgement as Stan carefully folded it into a handkerchief and slipped it into the drawer of his bedside locker, alongside his retainer and a lone condom their gym teacher handed out with a red-face at their safe-sex seminar. Bashfully, his eyes caught Richie’s. Richie’s squinting eyes and the spark behind them read,  _ ‘Are you seriously keeping my jaw like a creepy old lady who keeps her grandchildren’s baby teeth in her vanity table to be auctioned off at her wake?’ _ , Stan didn’t know what a wake was and he didn’t ask. Instead, he sat on his bed and pat the space beside him. Richie, with a roll of the eyes, plopped his butt down beside him, kicking his legs off the edge as he did so.

Eyebrows drawn upwards, asking if it was ok, Stan slowly raised his hand to Richie’s cheek. The space was monumental, the flay of Stan’s pajama pants rustling against the frayed hem of Richie’s shorts. As the ambush of electricity filled him head to toe, hand ever so tender on Richie’s cheek, a mundane thought crossed his mind, absurd for such a time. Heart swelling under the dark gaze of Richie’s eyes, cheeks threatening to pink, veins fire hot, under all these conditions, seminal and newfound feelings not yet defined, the mundane thought crossed his mind as such: Richie’s shorts are frayed, he needs new clothes.

Carefully, Stan rubbed his thumb over some of the cracks. With added concentration, the warm flood of honey through his fingertips and into the coldness of Richie’s skin. Richie almost flinched at the suddenness of it. But he stayed still. Sure enough, the little spider-legs receded back into the chasm from whence they sprouted. 

With a small frown, “What was your nightmare about?” 

Richie blinked and squirmed a little, although Stan’s hold kept him still. Adamantly avoiding Stan’s eyes he tried to convey what he needed to say, after a few half-assed attempts, Richie huffed and gave Stan a look. The look: accompanied by a heavy breath and a tired blink and a crease between the brows,  _ ‘I lost someone. It sucked.’ _

  
They both had similar nightmares. Part of it could be down to their connection, Stan assumes. Worried his voice would waver, Stan gave him a fleeting moment of eye contact before going back to pressing the pads of his fingers tenderly on the sore spots,  _ ‘Who?’ _

Richie refused to acknowledge the question and even went as far as to push the non-existent cuticles back on his fingernails like he had watched Eddie do with fascination. The sharp jump of Stan’s heart was answer enough. The sharp pull of his chest was hard and sudden, like Richie was checking that Stan was still there. That they were still together. Stan wanted to try it too. Taking his focus away from the honey warmth webbing through his fingertips, he tried to focus on the  _ exact _ spot he felt Richie. The center of his chest. He prodded and when he was certain he found it: he thought of Richie. 

A violent jolt. Richie almost fell off of the bed. With humour in his eyes, Richie righted himself again,  _ ‘I know that I’m hot stuff, but please try to keep it in your pants, Stanley.’ _

“Sorry,” Stan said, feeling his cheeks heat, a little embarrassed but not unpleasantly so, “I didn’t think it would be so… strong.” 

Richie’s shoulders tensed and his gaze floundered from holding Stan’s own gaze to looking shallowly around the room. Sensing his discomfort, Stan, whose hands were still on Richie’s cheeks, took one of Richie’s into his own and held it under his own, moving back to the shattered porcelain cheek, “I think it will go quicker if you help,” He said. It didn’t. But Richie didn’t pull away, and Stan didn’t want him too. Every touch like a momentary high, every touch washing away another worry, another fear. Somehow making Stan feel like he was floating  _ and _ steeling him into reality. The grounding of it firmly brushed off any notion that it might be some fantastical part of Stan’s imagination. It was real, tangible. As real as the stars in the sky and the socks on his feet. 

Richie’s eyes had softened, more content, more relaxed. More grounded. A quirk of his brow,  _ ‘This is weird, right?’. _

Stan thought about it a little, “I guess,” A little added pressure on Richie’s hand - still there. “But not to us - right?” 

Richie’s nose scrunched and his cheeks lifted his eyes into a more cheery disposition,  _ ‘Yeah… not to us.’ _

  
  
  


When they woke up the next morning with gleeful yellow pooling across their cheeks, they did so in a mess of limbs. Legs hiked over the other’s, arms over bellies and Stan’s hand limply on the crook of Richie’s neck. Normally Stan hated sharing beds, waking up to Eddie’s hot breath on his cheek or Bill’s bony elbows jutting in his ribcage or Ben squashing him up against the wall. But this was different… Stan felt more at ease and importantly, safer. 

_ The monsters can’t get us here.  _ Except they can. They can and they will. 

Wordlessly, with the taste of sleep heavy in their mouths, the two boys with honey in their veins rolled up Richie’s sleeping bag and Stan packed it carefully back in the closet and closed the door, packing it away properly - under heavy boxes and out of sight and out of mind. Even as Richie clicked his newly-formed jaw with discomfort, loud sickly noises whenever he spoke, they were happier - calmer. Even the nightmares were locked away, safe with their hands entwined. Hands entwined on the covers of the bed as Stan carefully ate his oatmeal with his left hand.


	7. Chapter 5: Sponsored by Coca-Cola

Derry Public Library is a colosseum of weathered red brick and colonial fringe with large windows that on the stuffy summer days, Ben would politely ask the librarian if he could open, a growing boy needs fresh air, ma’am. A feat of architecture for its time, the bell tower atop its newly shingled roof rang louder than all of the churches’ bells in Derry put together. Six and a half  _ bongs! _ and the kids all across Derry Town would sprint back to their little houses for their dinner.

Ben, before he had built a dam with Eddie and Bill some years ago, had spent the best of his time here. Usually in the kids section. Not so much because of the books themselves, Ben was well above his reading age since as long as he could remember, but the greenhouse-like corridor separating the kids section off from the rest of the building. A long corridor, lined with large windows that cut prisms into the speckled carpet whenever the sun hit it just right. Warmth on his cheeks, the smell of books both old with must and new with shiny, new-printed covers.

Today, however, Ben didn’t have the time to pursue that glittering corridor. Today, he was honoured with an immeasurable task, one which he takes very seriously. So seriously that he had packed himself an extra bologna sandwich to keep his energy up with the hard work of it. The task: help Richie - help his  _ friend _ . Sometimes his heart still did an unexpectant jump whenever he said it. His  _ friends _ . Ben had never known how tightly-fit he wore his isolation. It both encompassed and overreached the broader parts of his adolescence. Now, with a sense of belonging, no room for disputing his place in their lives, Ben Hanscom has found his family. 

“Found anything yet, Ben?” Eddie asked, stretching to see Ben over the large leather-bound book he had sitting upright on the table in front of him, tapping on the cover. They weren’t in the children’s section. Oh no. They were in a section that Ben had only ever stumbled upon once on accident, looking for the bathroom. The dusty corner of the library had intrigued him enough to scope the place out, like he was in the Raiders of the Lost Ark. There was no buried treasure to be found here, though. They had spent all day holed up in the room, the blinds broken and stuck half-closed, lighting up the dust particles in glorious stripes of orange. Every so often the light would perfectly ribbon along Beverly’s face, exploding her eyes into church windows of ultramarine. Ben would feel his cheeks explode in kindness to a blotchy, tomato-red.

This room, not really a room, per say. Cornered off the main part of the library with only a small, almost secret entrance between the bulwarks of mighty bookshelves, so tall that even Bill had gone scavenging for a step-stool at one point. It was secluded enough and soundproofed so much that not once had they been shushed or even acknowledged by the librarian. It gave them the solitude they needed to look through all of the census around the years Richie believes he was born. Marriage certificates, birth certificates, old Derry High School yearbooks (although the school at the time had been called Derry Catholic School for Commendable Boys, and Girls respectively). All of that had turned empty, and Ben had taken to the immense task of trailing through old newspapers on the microfilm reader. 

“Nothing yet. I’m looking through the  _ Awards and Academia  _ section for each paper first. Even if Richie won so much as gold-star on his spelling sheets, his face would be in the paper. Derry was a pretty small town back then, so pretty much anything that happened was put in the  _ Derry Times _ . Betsy Heigemeir won the fifth-grade spelling bee three weeks in a row in nineteen-fifty, in case anyone was wondering.” 

“We don’t even know if Richie is from Derry,” Beverly said. She was sitting opposite Eddie, hair in pigtails that she would absent-mindedly play with while reading through book after book of the  _ Yellow Pages.  _ “He hasn’t recognised the surnames of any of the Richards in the pages.” 

“I don’t think I was rich. I probably didn’t even have a phone,” Richie said as he peeled an orange for Stan, offering Beverly, who was beside him, a segment. She took it and held it up to the streak of sunlight to check for pips. Richie’s jaw made a bone-chilling click every time he spoke.

“I think he is,” Ben said, not quite being sure  _ why _ he thought this. It just felt right. The others felt the same, and there were no further disputes as the afternoon light sunk to evening and the sun started to lower over the Kenduskeag. 

The entire day they were there, Ben can’t recall hearing a single other soul. Not a stifled cough from the older gents who frequented the library whom mostly were employed in the factories with dirty air that filled their lungs, or the creak of the bookcart with the wheel that needs desperately oiled, or the clip-clip of the librarian’s kitty heels on the floorboards. Even more oddly, not even the sound of cars turning onto Main Street, not even the sound of kids playing marbles against the wall (as they so frequently did, if Ben’s mind’s eye map is right, then they should be at the South West corner, where the painted-red bench is. He knows this because, on sunny days, Ben would take a funnybook and read it there. Now he keeps his funnybooks for reading at home and shoots marbles with his friends there), or the white-noise of the fast-flowing Kenduskeag.

The silence was… suffocating. Unnatural. It was as if they were all alone.

Ben shook off the goosebumps growing on his forearms. He’s just spooked because of all these articles he’s skimming through. All the missing kids.

His mother had always said there was something  _ ‘off _ ’ about Derry. Something indispensably  _ wrong _ in the very core of the town but he never thought much of it because she usually said it after she had a nasty client in work or whenever she encountered a particularly bad driver. She said it when little Georgie Denbrough had gone missing, too. Ben shot Bill a guilty look, feeling bad for even  _ thinking _ about it. 

Ben spoke just to fill the awful silence, and for reasons beyond his own control, he said, “Derry has a  _ lot  _ of missing kids.” Everyone turned to spare him a horrified glance, except Bill, who faulted then continued looking through the slides of old Derry Town maps. There was a carousel slide projector somewhere in the downstairs bit. The ‘ _ Entry for Library or Town Council Personnel Only’  _ bit that had an informal subtitle of ‘ _ Entry for Ben Hanscom if he has been Awfully Good or if the Librarian is feeling especially Pitiful of him’ _ . There wasn’t much of interest for him down there, so he’d only been down a couple of times. 

“I know that…” Eddie’s eyes darted anxiously at Bill, who was still pretending he hadn’t heard, “a few kids have gone missing recently.” 

“No, I mean back in the olden days. Late fifties to early sixties.”

“How many?” Richie asked, ripping the orange peel to shreds. He claimed he couldn’t read the books so he had spent the majority of his day flipping through the history books looking at the pictures, pointing at pictures of uglies and saying that they resemble Eddie.

“Well, they only started cropping up in fifty-nine. There were three that year. A pair of twins from the other side of town, then a two-year-old who lived in that ruddy apartment block by the East side of the river - no offence, Beverly.” He grew red, forgetting Beverly lived there. She just smiled at him, she knows it’s a dump, too. “Then in sixty it seemed to lie low for a while, and then during the summer there were thirteen kids in six weeks.” 

“It just stops?” Beverly asked, getting up and standing beside him, looking at the microfilm machine with Ben she read it out. “ _ Gage Creed, two-years-old of Cony Street is the thirteenth child declared missing by the Derry Town Sheriff. The mother, Nell Creed, claims he was playing in the front yard around noon when she turned her back after hearing the sound of children crying from inside her home. When asked if she may have mistaken the crying from her neighbour’s child through the thin walls of their twin homes as coming from within her home, she had this to say:  _

_ “‘I hear those kids crying up a storm every day. Morning, noon and night. I could name those four kids by name by their cries alone through the plasterboard. No… the kids that I heard were different. They were… echos? Like they were crying in a big hall, like the Parish Hall except with no furniture. It sounded like it was coming from all around me… God… it was so loud…’ _ . _ Creed claims to have only turned her back for less than five seconds, and when she looked back, little Gage was gone, the red tricycle he had been playing on still had its front wheel spinning from where it lay upturned on the grass. After questioning both Misses and Mister Creed, the latter who was trucking up Northern Maine at this time, they are not deemed suspects. _

_ There have been no further developments regarding the disappearances of any other children, including the latest, ten-year-old Annie Wilkes, who disappeared only three days ago.” _

The silence choked. Even Beverly seemed at a loss to find words for what she had read. Richie found the words.

“Creepsville,” Richie said solemnly. 

“You sure got that right,” Eddie said, looking pale. 

“I don’t know if there are more… I haven’t gotten any farther than the end of nineteen-sixty…” Ben trailed off. Not sure what else to say. What else was there to say? 

“I have to go,” Bill said suddenly. At first, everyone was concerned that they’d upset him. All this ghastly talk of missing kids surely can’t be easy for him to listen to when Georgie is still out there. Still missing. 

( _ probably forever)  _

Bill began packing up his things. A soda bottle and a sheet of tin foil from his ham and cheese sandwich, which he had split with Eddie. Before anyone could voice their complaints, they all realised, in shocked unison, it was getting dark. 

Normally, this would be cause for little more than mild concern. A short scolding from their parents and the empty threat of no dinner the next time it happens. Now, with the curfew, the fading orange and the blooming dusk, spotted with the flickering streetlamps was their call home and somehow, seemingly over the spread of a few moments, they had missed the call. 

“It’s late.” Eddie said. “It’s gonna be dark soon.” The panic on Eddie’s face was warranted. Eddie would normally cut around the back of the library and follow that road until the crossroads, then a left, then walk back East to get home. It wasn’t long, but it would surely be long past sunset when he would arrive home and he’d probably walk in through the front door to the entire Sheriff’s department, the CIA, the Emergency Rescue Team and his mother having puppies and kittens on the living room floor. Not to mention he probably wouldn’t be allowed to leave the house for a week. The only other way is past Neibolt. Past the House. Eddie’s grip turned white on his aspirator.

“We’ll walk you home, Eddie. Won’t we?” Stan said kindly.

Richie nodded and gave a great buck-tooth smile, “We can’t let a pretty young thang like you walk home alone, Eds! We’d miss your little tush too much!” He went to pinch Eddie’s cheek but Eddie jumped out of his reach and slammed the census book shut. A puff of dust exploded from the pages. Bill helped him push the last of it into its place on the high shelf where Eddie’s tip-toes could only do so much. 

Quickly, the six of them gathered themselves and left the barracks they had been walled up within as neatly as they had found it, only without the inch-layer of dust. When Ben went to look out to see how low the sun had gotten, prepared to finger the stiff slats open to peer into the outside, they were closed. Not even a gold thread between them. Ben shouldered the thought away. He had to. He might lose his mind thinking about it too much. He felt a strong instinct not to point this out to anyone, that the broken blinds had mysteriously sealed themselves shut. 

On the way out, one by one troops marching confidently into no man’s land, Ben double-checked he turned off the microfilm machine. He swore he could smell burning. 

Turning the corridor, towards the more commonly ventured part of the library, the white noise of people came on so suddenly that Ben felt the cilia of his ears stand to attention, woken up after such extended silence. The metronome stamp stamp stamp of book returns, the whistle of the pipes straining with desperate heat to cut the chill, the comforting crinkle of book pages being read, the sound of an engine turning over from where one of the cars had stalled at the crossroads. 

Like taking a step into the real world after being in a dream-state for so long. Richie looked like he was about to make a remark, or do one of his voices but Stan had a gentle but firm on his arm in warning. Eddie’s eyes dashed back and forth down around the corner they had just turned. Bill, who was at the front, stopped with enough suddenness that Ben ran into his back and almost sent both of them sprawling to the floor. Ben’s face flushed with embarrassment but Bill just sent him an easy laugh, “I huh-hope your driving’s b-b-b-better than your wuh-walking, for Derry’s sake,” and Ben’s face exploded in blotchy colour when Beverly gave him a steadying sleight of hand.

Singed hair? 

Embered cotton? 

The burning smell grew stronger. The colour didn’t stay on his face long. A degree of unease began to devour inside him. A brackish mixture of horror and dread. The smell grew putrid in his nose, growing and plumaging. With a quick hand he pinched his nose shut and swirled to look to comment on it, but their faces were impassive, already making their way towards the exit. The double glass-stained featurette within view, just past the front desk, past the toddler reading nook which had been gated off with bookcarts ever since the incident last April when little Tommy Bridgeler’s parents had carted him to  _ Derry Public Library’s Weekly Kiddie Story Time _ despite his violent case of the sheets.  _ ‘You mean the squirts?’  _ Stan had said, Eddie laughed at that and said he  _ ‘moved to Shitt’s Creek’ _ , Bill had told him what his dad called it after a gastrointestinally gruelling evening following a meeting at an Indian Restaurant in Bangor,  _ ‘he cuh-cuh-could have shit through a screen d-d-door and not hit muh-metal’.  _ All of them had dissolved into fits of laughter so violent that the entire story had been forgotten about, and they moved onto another topic without so much as a backwards thought. 

Tommy Bridgeler, four years old, son of Catherine and Gerald Bridgeler had gone missing three months ago. 

He had gone missing without a trace. Not so much as a dirty raincoat or an upturned tricycle. Only ghosts of his life existed now, discolouration of the carpet where it had been stained by bleach, his initials stitched into the back of his rucksack, toys with thick layers of dust lying in the same disarray they had been on the day of his disappearance. 

The smell had grown so putrid it choked the air, yet Eddie hadn’t so much as reached for his aspirator yet. The stench of burning, not a fire. More like… burnt garbage, a half-burnt animal that was left to rot into the earth. It was coming from downstairs. The bit that only Library Personnel, Councilmen, and Ben Hanscom were allowed. 

It was behind a door, shouldered out of view between the  _ ‘Non-Christian Religions and Traditions’ _ section and the librarian’s weekly recommendations. The only thing Ben had ever seen walk past that direction was a beetle, or possibly some type of roach. The weathered wood, not kept as well as the important doors, set perfectly into the panelling, camouflaged if not for the dull silver plaque: ‘ _ Entry for Library or Town Council Personnel Only’ (and Ben Hanscom).  _ The knob was a huge, glittering crystal. Not proper crystal, not like his mother’s fancy scotch glasses, but pretty all the same.    
  
The knob turned. 

The world grew back into deafening silence. It turned slow. Twenty-degrees. Forty-five. Oh good grief, what on earth is going to come out? Smoke puffed out underneath the door. A person charred with burns? A zombie? The door rattled. And again. And an almighty thump. Ben didn’t dare to think that it could be what he had seen in that horror flick years ago. He had been too chicken to admit he didn’t like horror films and he sat through the two-hour special in the Aladdin. It couldn’t be a … mummy? 

Suddenly, a terrible ruckus ripped Ben’s eyes away from the crystal doorknob. Screaming and laughing cut through the quiet bidding of the library. Not the good kind, either. Not the screaming and laughing when Eddie would ride on the back of Silver and well and truly fear for his life (and his britches). Not the scream-laughing that little kids do playing tag. This was a short, true scream of fear bracketed by malice and cruelty. Jeering and verbal lashings, cutting deeper and deeper until it’s all the poor fucker can do but go home and lick the salt out of his wounds. 

Henry Bowers.

Henry Bowers and some other poor fucker. It wasn’t one of them, not this time. It wasn’t Eddie’s busted nose, it wasn’t Big Bill’s waterlog, it wasn’t Ben’s walking insignia, not Stanley’s cheek, not Beverly’s yanked pigtails. It was some other kid, at the wrong place, wrong time. But… something inside him said different. Something inside him said it  _ was _ one of them. In the  _ right _ place,  _ right _ time. True to their likemindedness, Ben didn’t even need to blink before they were all running out the exit in uniform. 

The doorknob stopped turning. The smell of singed hair and burning roadkill slinked down the stairs and out of memory. 

The winter sun, although lying low, was there. Late afternoon, but not evening. Not dark. Not dark for another handful of hours. The light blinded their eyes and Eddie tripped over his own feet and fell onto the ground. He cried in pain as his hands made harsh contact with the gravel. His palms broke raw in places, with gravel sticking into them and falling one at a time as he lifted himself off of the ground. Richie grabbed him by the back of the collar and yanked him up and back just in time for a half-empty coke bottle to smash on the ground, just where Eddie’s head would have been. The sound startled Stan especially, automatically finding Richie to make sure he was still in one piece. 

“Good job you’ve got your boyfriend to look out for you, Kaspbrak.” Henry Bowers, wide in the open, with his heel digging into the back of a boy, which Richie will soon come to know as Mike Hanlon. He didn’t know Henry Bowers, or Victor Cross and Belch Huggins, who were taking turns in helping pin the kid down and threatening to rub raw veal from a previously neat and tight-packed envelope in his face. 

“Better than having two butt-boys,” Richie said. Richie’s mouth had a terrible habit of running miles ahead, getting him in all sorts of trouble. Stan hissed out a warning, and by some grace of God, his mouth snapped up shut.

Henry let out a low sort of growl, and stepped towards them but shot back and swiftly met his foot against the kid’s ribs. Over and over again. Richie was waiting to hear the sickly crunch of ribs or something, but instead he got Beverly’s voice, “We have to help him! We have to stop Henry!”

“We do?” Richie asked, feeling bad but imagining himself at the end of those harsh kicks. He’d shattered amongst the coke bottle in no time. 

“Yes,” She said incredulously, and good God,  _ ran towards _ Bowers. Her thin jumper flapped around her form as she jumped down the steps. Her pigtails trailed behind her in the air and Richie had half a mind to grab them, pull her back and tie her to the building. Instead he stood there and watched as she landed a harsh shove to Henry, who was taken by surprise, before she was given a teaching upside the head. Before Henry could do anything else, Ben exploded violently and suddenly. He let out a booming roar that cracked a little bit at the end. Ben followed Beverly in suit and ploughed down the steps and threw himself into the gut of Henry Bowers. 

Seeing Victor and Belch move off of Mike Hanlon and gear towards Ben, who was getting in some clean hits with Henry, Bill threw himself into the shuffle, despite Stanley’s protests from the sidelines, where he had pulled Beverly back and was checking her over. Beverly pushed Stan’s hands off from her newly-forming bruise and followed Bill. 

Bill and Beverly hit any parts of Victor and Belch they could find, but it was two small, weedy kids against the two and they barely got half a dozen hits in when Belch grabbed Beverly by her fiery tails and kept her there. She couldn’t move and a mumbled, cave-man like grunt to Victor sent Bill flying to the pavement with a heavy crack on the head. Victor grabbed the envelope of raw veal and shared a wicked smile with Belch, who nodded. Beverly’s face blew wide and she kicked at all of Belch: his legs, his groin, his stomach but none of them landed with enough force to do anything but make Belch more bull-faced and red. Beverly’s wet greens met Richie’s shocked gaze.

Richie was almost knocked back by the wave of emotion that washed over him. Some, Beverly’s: pain; fear; helplessness with an underlying spice of judicial fury. Some, his own: protectiveness; shock; indignant rage. 

Richie threw himself into the middle of it, and Stan, who saw images of Richie exploding into dust again, raced behind him. Richie snatched the raw veal out of Victor’s hand and smashed it, as hard as he could, into Victor’s nose. Victor, horrified, stepped back, where Stan kicked his feet down from under him. Seeing Belch distracted, Beverly braced her elbow upwards then drove it down into Belch’s groin with as much force as she could muster. Belch made a hollow sound and fell to the ground, Beverly’s pigtails long forgotten. His face manoeuvred an ugly contortion of pain, just as Richie made tracks to teach him a lesson, a shrill scream cut them off.

_ Eddie. _

Eddie, arms around the back of Henry’s neck, feet kicking wildly off the ground, arms flexing with the effort to keep stable while Henry bucks wildly trying to kick him off, while holding Ben by the scruff of his shirt. Henry’s face was an awful mash of blood, gravel and dirt. Richie let out a big hoot, “Go geddim, Eds! Yee-haw!” Richie ran towards the scuffle and sunk a hard foot into Henry’s boots, the most he could do without getting into the scrummage and risk being taken home in a dustpan. Bill soon took hold of Henry’s free hand that was grappling at Eddie. Stan wrapped his arms around the hand holding Ben, and Richie, doing all he could, sunk his teeth into his arm, “‘Av got rabies! ‘Av got rabies, Henry! Now you gots rabies, too!” 

The scrummage didn’t last long, Eddie jumped off of Henry’s back and bolted leaving Beverly with the honours of gutting her boot into his stomach, then the boys wrapped up in his limbs pushed forward in unionised might and drove him to the ground. They scrammed. They bolted. Running to pick up their bikes, with Bill pulling Mike Hanlon along on Silver, whether the kid wanted to or not. Stan waited with a sweaty upper lip for Richie to jump up on his back wheel. 

Jumping over a planter box, Richie took stock of Bowers’ coke stash. Three full glass bottles in all their sugary glory. Snatching one in each hand, Richie took the third and smashed it to the ground beside Victor and Belch, “Scatter!!!” He cried and jumped on the back of Stanley’s bike with two gifts for himself. He remembered the sweet thickness of the drink. The carbonation so strong it almost felt spicy. A hot summer’s day and a cool bottle of Coca-Cola. Stan pedalled and pedalled and Richie laughed and wrapped his arms around Stan’s stomach for dear life as Derry whipped past.

They hunkered down in the alleyway beside Keene’s Pharmacy. Silver leaning haphazardly against some trashcans. Ben and Beverly’s bikes were thrown to the ground as they counted up some crinkled dollars and coins to pay for Eddie’s growing list of demands. Thankfully they didn’t need as many as they did when Ben had Henry’s initials carved into his belly. Thankful for the fact that they could pay for it, with three cents to spare. After the last escapade, Mr Keene kept an uncomfortably close eye on Eddie whenever he came to pick up his prescription, or Beverly whenever she came in to buy sanitary pads.

Richie tried to make small talk while Ben and Beverly gathered supplies. He was standing beside Stan, watching Eddie carefully examine the cuts on Mike’s face and arms. Bill beside Eddie, hunkered down in a sharp-looking squat. Richie reckons that even if Bill sat square on his boney tush he would still be taller than Eddie. Bill’s eyes were bright with concern and he kept asking the boy questions. 

Richie’s mouth acted of its own accord for the second time that day. “I didn’t know there were blacks in Derry.” Richie yelped when Stan gripped his arm firmly. The closest Stan could get to hitting him without breaking his arm off, or something. “What! I’m only saying… don’t get your panties in a twist.”

“Richie! You can’t just say stuff like that.” Eddie said, looking flushed and uncomfortable but Mike only shook his head, like Richie had just landed a baby-round of chucks.

“It’s alright.” He said kindly. His face was warm and friendly. Richie suddenly felt very embarrassed for his statement, even though he had meant no foul by it. He felt the change in the air. “I didn’t know Derry still had an active beaver population either. We learn something new every day, huh?” 

Richie shot a hand up to his mouth, up to his teeth, briefly offended. Stan snorted and laughed openly at his expense, the bastard. Oh, wait. They’re  _ all _ laughing at his expense. And suddenly Richie was too. After a round of laughter, the warming glow of the sun falling into late afternoon, the previous facade of dusk long forgotten, Ben and Beverly came out and played theater nurses for Eddie who finished up Mike’s injuries silently with a gentle butterfly stitch on his brow. Eddie took out his snot-rag and wiped the blood from his fingers.

Richie patted Eddie on the back and let out a low whistle. “Well done, Doctor K. Another successful surgery. I dare say you ‘ave the ‘ands of a magician! Tell us, what’s yer secret?” Richie’s radio presenter voice had a grainy film quality to it and Bill muttered out that it sounded naught different than Richie’s regular voice, but what does that schmuck know? Eddie was silent. Richie nudged him, “Eh, Doctor K? Don’t keep us in th’dark! … Eds? What’s wrong?” Eddie was crying. Silent glimmering tears were dripping steadily, calmly from his eyes.

He wasn’t red-faced when he turned to consider Richie. He was calm. He was smiling. It made Richie’s stomach drop. Like when you’re riding a rollercoaster, and you’re climbing up and up and up and then suddenly you’re at the top, looking straight down and your stomach falls into your shoes and you think  _ ‘Oh cripes. Oh gosh. Good fucking grief, Charlie Brown. This is where it really starts, isn’t it? Everything before this was just babystuff. Now we’re in the thick of it and there’s no turning back.’ _ Eddie’s eyes glistened. A sordid mix of elation, peace and resignation to some unearthly horror. Somehow, Richie knows why. He can feel it. With a stream of amber sunset refracting yellow off of Eddie's glistening eyes, it all clicked.

Mike is the last piece. 

Richie reached over and gave Mike a firm squeeze on his arm, just to be sure. His chest collided with the brick wall of the alley with all the force of a plane falling nose-first into the tarmac. This is it. This is where it all starts. His gut bubbled and fizzed and popped. This is where the story begins.

_ (And this is where the story ends) _

One by one, they all feel it. Ben’s face flushes. Beverly laughs deliriously. Stan gets viciously light-headed and sits his ass flat on the ground of the grimy alleyway. Mike struggles to find breath. Eddie’s eyes continue to drip and Bill lets out a loud cry and sobs brokenly into Eddie’s bloody snotrag when it was offered. They all feel it. They all know they’re strapped in by some cosmic force on the worst fucking roller coaster ride of their lives. 

There it clicked: there’s seven of them.  _ Seven. _ It’s monumental. It’s unforgiving. It’s beautiful. 

Beneath their feet, in the dark underbelly of Derry Town, the beast looms. Seven. The seven have found each other. Despite all the efforts to prevent it. Seven strings, interconnected across gender, religion, race, and time itself - all that human garbage that the species has considered important. These seven, despite all the barriers put in place, have found each other. Baring Its teeth, It prepares for a feast. They smell popcorn in the distance. 

**Author's Note:**

> This has been LONG in the making and I have several chapters already written. Written for the IT Fairytale Project.  
I hope everyone enjoyed!! Let me know what you think !


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